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Fear and Trembling: A Week in EnglandWednesday, January 13, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
To a visiting American Israeli blogger, English Jews display shocking signs of a fearfulness both physical and psychological.American Aid to Israel: The Numbers
Wednesday, January 13, 2010 by David Hazony | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Over the past two decades, by every reasonable measure, U.S. aid has plummeted.
The Harshness of CreationLike the 2004 tsunami that devastated southeast Asia, yesterday's catastrophic earthquake in Haiti, a poverty-stricken country with a legacy of home-grown violence and suffering, inevitably provoked the terrible question: where was God? One answer derives from Jewish religious sources, and specifically from the teachings of the Kabbalah. It has to do with tzimtzum, or contraction: that is, God's own contraction and limitation of Himself in order to make space for the finite—and invariably flawed—worlds of physical nature and human action. The idea was most famously developed in Safed, Palestine by the 16th-century kabbalist Isaac Luria as part of a complicated, esoteric myth...
Tuesday, January 12, 2010 by David Brooks | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Israel's technological success marks the fruition of the Zionist dream; could it also contribute to its undoing?Evgeny Kissin Takes On the BBC
Tuesday, January 12, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
In an open letter, the world-famous pianist charges a news service that once served as "a beacon of light, of truth and objectivity to those of us behind the Iron Curtain" with "aligning itself with Iran's despotic leader" against Israel and with "anti-Semitic propaganda."Swamped with Singles
Tuesday, January 12, 2010 by Yael Brygel | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Young, religious, and unmarried: a celebrated, groundbreaking television series explores life in a vibrant and frustrated Jerusalem neighborhood.
Was Dostoevsky a Scoundrel?The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), rightly known as a peerless master of psychological fiction, a fierce anti-socialist polemicist, an anti-romantic with a pulsingly romantic commitment to prophetic religion, and a dramatist of moral ideas without compare since the English poet John Milton, also happened to harbor an ugly fixation on the Jews.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010 by Hillel Halkin | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
An international best-seller makes one decent point, all but drowned in an ocean of puerile shoddiness, distortion, and falsehood.Supermario
Tuesday, January 12, 2010 by Avner Avrahami | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
A Romanian-born Israeli astrophysicist and Renaissance man, who now spends twelve hours a day working on the Hubble telescope, dilates on God, the golden ratio, the Israeli education system, the romance of mathematics, and much more.
Jewish Wars, Then and NowMonday, January 11, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
A masterwork of historical writing, The Jewish Wars by Yosef ben Matityahu, better known by his Roman name of Flavius Josephus (37–ca. 100 C.E.) is a massive and indispensable chronicle of Jewish fortunes from the Hasmonean Revolt in the second century B.C.E. through the destruction of the Temple and the fall of Masada in 73 C.E. It is also the autobiography of an extraordinary and extraordinarily conflicted man. Military leader, historian, biblical interpreter, negotiator, diplomat, neither martyr nor traitor but something in-between, Josephus traversed a route from battlefield commander in the war against Rome to Roman citizen and favored beneficiary of imperial...
