View from Jerusalem
“Pogrom!” roared the old man. “Do you know what a pogrom is?!”
One week before Rosh Hashanah, in the midst of Ramadan, as jittery bloggers probed the psyches of U.S. election candidates and the front pages featured the frightening spectacle of the Wall Street meltdown, a teenage resident of Jerusalem named Qassem al-Mughrabi plowed a black BMW sedan into a group of IDF soldiers near the Jaffa Gate, injuring 19.
Every so often someone calls me from America with a perfectly reasonable question. Their daughter, they say, wants to spend next semester in Israel – is it safe?
When was the last time you saw the movie “Exodus”? Have you ever seen it on the big screen?
It’s a strange season here in Israel. Ahmadinejad is threatening to wipe us off the map.
In honor of Israel’s 60th birthday in May, President Shimon Peres threw a party, a festive international conference.
Not too far from my home, there’s a street named for the German poet Heinrich Heine, a baptized Jew and metaphorical Marrano. Sometimes on Shabbat afternoons I take a long Jerusalem walk
On a pleasant Thursday evening in early spring I found myself in a classy new Jerusalem restaurant on Shlomzion Street, named for a Hasmonean queen of the first century C.E.
Seventy-seven percent of the Israeli public believed Bush's peace-promoting trip to the region would come to naught.
On the week of my sixtieth birthday, I sit down to write. What’s been happening? Where have I been?
The month of Elul, shortly before Rosh Hashanah, a season of penitence and soul-searching
In the fourth century CE, the Emperor Constantine famously became Christian, and the Roman Empire along with him, thereby assuring the triumph of the faith and the long-lasting plight of the Jews.
For years I’ve wondered about the people who first owned my house. I figure that many Americans are similarly curious, if they live, say, in a Chicago brownstone, or a Hollywood bungalow built in the 1920s.
View from Jerusalem Stuart Schoffman Stuart Schoffman is a columnist for JUF News and an associate editor of The Jerusalem Report. In the biblical Book of Numbers, Moses famously sends 12 spies to scout out the Promised Land. They
The View From Jerusalem Stuart Schoffman “History has been unkind to the Jewish people and to the Palestinian people,” said the Palestinian activist seated beside me on a stage in Colorado. Born in Jerusalem, he is an American citizen,
Getting psyched up for Passover, the Festival of Freedom, has been a bit of a challenge this year. We Jews sit around the seder table and celebrate Exodus and redemption, but everywhere we turn are tsuris, new Jewish woes.
It's no secret that Israel that is undergoing a crisis of leadership. The army's chief of staff has lately resigned, so too the head of the national police force. Prime Minister Olmert, to put it mildly, is not doing well in the opinion polls. There's been a lull in violence, but anxiety remains. On the other hand, as I often tell my friends in e-mails describing the local State of Mind, the weather is great.
Every film lover knows "Citizen Kane," but fewer recall another nifty Orson Welles vehicle, "The Stranger" (1946). In this one, again starring and directed by the prodigious Welles, a Nazi war criminal reinvents himself as a Connecticut professor married to the all-American Loretta Young, and is hunted down by a Mr. Wilson of the U.N. War Crimes Commission, played by Edward G. Robinson. Born Emanuel Goldenberg—hence the "G."—the feisty Robinson seldom portrayed
Two strange Central Asian figures have been weighing on my wary mind at the New Year: Ahmadinejad and Borat.
Those who care deeply about Israel have something new to worry about al-Jazeera in English. The Gulf-based media behemoth—Persian Gulf, that is, not good old friendly Galveston—has just launched a 24/7 global news service to rival CNN and BBC, whom friends of Israel aren't thrilled with either. Now, on hi-def screens in bars and cafes, cellular phones and other wi-fi contraptions, home and office computers, and plain old color TVs in rumpus rooms, viewers worldwide will be treated to a look at Israel (and the rest of the known universe) from a decidedly Arab perspective. Welcome to the 21st century.
Big news in Israel this fall, as days grow shorter and skies cloudier, is the possible inclusion in Prime Minister Olmert's coalition government of the far-right Yisrael Beitenu party, headed by Avigdor Lieberman. According to a poll published on the eve of Simhat Torah in Yediot Aharonot, Lieberman's party would win 20 seats in the 120-member Knesset if elections were held now. (Today it has 11.) Likud, headed by Bibi Netanyahu, would win 22. Olmert's Kadima party would get only 15 seats, half its current strength.
I remember when Chaim Weizmann died. It was November 1952 and I was not quite 5. Born in a Russian shtetl in 1874, Weizmann received his chemistry Ph.D. in Switzerland, moved to Manchester, England, in 1904, and was instrumental in securing the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which authorized the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In 1948, he became Israel's first president. My mother was cooking dinner in Brooklyn when she heard the news of Weizmann's death, of a long illness, on the radio. I remember that she cried and I asked her why.
Israel, as I write, is at war with Hezbollah, but we carry on. Today I went for my regular swim. Somewhere around 10 laps it suddenly occurred to me that my counterpart in Haifa isn't doing his laps today. And I suddenly imagined a Syrian-designed missile zooming in from Lebanon and smashing through the all-weather roof of my German Colony pool, spraying lethal pellets on impact with the water. I kept swimming, maybe a bit faster.
When the new Lebanon war broke out I was at the movies. In mid-July I served as a juror at the 23rd annu
Summer has arrived in the Holy Land, and with it many visitors. The headlines may be full of Hamas, but from January through May, close to 884,000 tourists from around the world made their way to our shores—a 25 percent increase over the first five months of 2006.
Every year, on the day following Passover, the extended Moroccan Jewish community in Israel throws a traditional nationwide shindig known as Mimouna, dedicated to hospitality and fabulous food. Families visit each other at home, or picnic and barbecue in public parks and beaches. It's a joyful custom going back many generations, transplanted to our old-new land.
As the springtime tranquility of Passover was shattered by a suicide bomber in Tel Aviv, and the nation braced for another round of violence, my thoughts turned to a wintry morning a few months back. The prime minister lay in a coma. Jewish settlers were rioting in Hebron. The Hamas was running hard for political office, with pollsters predicting they'd come in second.
Every spring around Purim we make a trip up north with friends. We took Highway 6 to the Wadi Ara road, passed ancient Megiddo—better known as Armageddon—and arrived at our lodgings at a charming moshav near Mount Tabor, west of the Sea of Galilee. In the Bible (Judges 4), Mount Tabor is where Deborah and Barak and ten thousand men of Naphtali and Zebulon wiped out the forces of the Canaanite King Yavin, who "had oppressed Israel ruthlessly for twenty years. In the Christian tradition, it is where Jesus took three of his disciples into a high mountain apart, and was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light," in the miraculous presence, as well, of Moses and Elijah. (Matthew 17.)
Legions of Israel's supporters, in this unsettling season, recognize too well the exotic name of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the vicious fanatic who serves, for now, as president of Iran. But how many have heard of Shoshana Damari? Born in Yemen and brought to Palestine as a baby, Damari was the great Israeli pop diva of her generation, an earthy and colorful performer whose strong, throaty voice delighted audiences for decades. In February, she died at the age of 83, and was accorded a state funeral.
It's not going to be easy for the next prime minister. Iranian nukes are a fast-happening nightmare. Nearly 1.6 million Israelis—a quarter of the population—live under the poverty line. Palestinian politics are in turmoil, with Hamas gaining ground. Worst of all, the incumbent, the strongest man in Israel, Ariel Sharon, is still (as of this writing) in a coma.
Everybody's talking about Spielberg's Munich. I've not yet seen it, so won't review it—I'm old-fashioned that way. But I did read Time's gushy encomium to Spielberg's masterpiece, as well as Leon Wieseltier's elegant evisceration of the film in The New Republic, and I figure, for the moment, that "Munich" lies someplace in between.
On the tenth anniversary, by the Hebrew calendar, of Yitzhak Rabin's death, some 200,000 Israelis gathered in the massive square where he was murdered and which now bears his name, to honor his memory. Amid the great assembly of my fellow citizens I looked around, left and right, ahead and behind, not so much counting heads as wondering
Mosul, the second-largest city in modern Iraq, is built on the ruins of Nineveh, storied capital of the ancient Assyrians. Nineveh reached the zenith of its splendor under the ruler Sennacherib around 700 BCE, was laid waste by the Medes and Babylonians in 612 BCE, and never recovered. Jews mainly remember Nineveh via the Book of Jonah, which is read each year in the synagogue during afternoon prayers (mincha) on Yom Kippur.
It's a Thursday afternoon in mid-August. It's hot in Jerusalem. My teenage son and I have the air conditioner on and are watching TV together. It's all Gaza, all the time. The screen on Channel One (Israel state TV) is split between Neve Dekalim, biggest of the Gush Katif settlements, and the more isolated settlement of Kfar Darom. Most of the settlers have already
Loaded up with Oreo cookies, assorted candies, chips, cheese sandwiches, chewing gum, and chocolate croissants from our neighborhood café, my wife and I piloted our Honda out of Jerusalem on a broiling Monday afternoon and headed south, toward Gaza.
Among the high points of summer 2004 in Israel was the arrival of three planeloads of olim (new immigrants) under the auspices of Nefesh B'Nefesh (Jewish Souls United), the private organization that for the past three years has been a central factor in promoting and facilitating the immigration of North American Jews to Israel. By providing financial assistance and counseling, and by working with the Jewish Federation's resettlement agency, the Jewish Agency for Israel, the group has enabled new Anglo immigrants to land softly and confidently on our shores, unencumbered by much of the institutional and governmental red tape that over the years has caused more than one newcomer to wonder, all too soon, whether this was such a good idea after all. (I speak from personal experience.)
The 3rd of July, 2004, marked 100 years exactly since the passing of Theodor Herzl, the brilliant Viennese journalist who invented the State of Israel. On that very day, on my way home from a Jewish studies conference in Australia, I found myself of all improbable places on the Coral Coast of Viti Levu, the main island of the republic of Fiji.
Often I am asked, particularly during my visits to the Old Country, why is it that the Palestinians and their supporters always seem to be on message, to present a unified front, to be skilled at public relations and propaganda, whereas Israelis and Jews in general can never seem to agree among themselves, present a fuzzy and conflicted picture to the media and the world, and otherwise shoot themselves in the foot during this dangerous moment in our history?
March 31, 2004--Life in Israel is full of surprises, all right. On a recent morning I stepped out to my front lawn to pick up the papers, expecting the top story to be more bad news about Gaza, the controversial fence, Sharon's financial imbroglios—but no. The headlines reported good news—sort of: Israeli police had succeeded in capturing four hit men who had slipped into the country from (are you ready for this?) Belarus, recruited by Israeli underworld figures to knock off rival gangland bosses. Belarus, seedbed of Zionism—legions of the country's founders and builders were born there, when it was known as White Russia—now furnishes criminals-for-hire to a beleaguered country whose police have their hands full battling terrorists. There's a movie in it somewhere, don't you think?
There's a scene in Steven Spielberg's controversial film "Munich" that kept coming back to me during Israel's terrible summer war in Lebanon. After doing away with the first terrorist target in Rome—a gentle-seeming Arab poet, carrying his groceries—the Israeli assassins celebrate with food and wine in an outdoor restaurant in a picturesque piazza. Two of the killers are slow-dancing together to an Italian-language recording of the Motown hit "My Girl," as their conversation turns to a Talmudic legend in which God rebukes the angels for rejoicing when the Egyptians—His creatures—drown in the Red Sea while pursuing the Israelites. The point being? asks one member of the team. The point being, chimes in the rugged hit man called Steve—played by Daniel Craig, the latest cinematic James Bond—"don't **** with the Jews."
Sixty years ago exactly, on the cold night of Pearl Harbor Day, Dec. 7, 1941, the Nazis rounded up Jews from the Riga ghetto, packed them into dark blue buses, drove them to a forest called Rumbula on the outskirts of the city, and murdered them. Among the dead that December night was an 81-year-old widower named Simon Dubnow, a world-famous Jewish historian who wrote in Russian. According to one version of the story, Dubnow had a high fever, was too feeble to board the bus, and was shot in the back of the head by a drunken Latvian militiaman. Soon a legend arose, as legends tend to do around heroic figures, regarding Dubnow's last words: "People, do not forget! Speak of this, people; record it all!"
A few weeks ago I had occasion to spend some time at Jerusalem's Bikur Cholim hospital, visiting an ailing relative. The hospital was founded in the mid-19th century, in the Old City, and moved in 1925 to its present location on Straus Street, midway between the heart of downtown the intersection of King George and Jaffa Road and the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Me'ah Shearim. Much of the hospital has been renovated in recent years, but its overall aura of antiquity does conjure nostalgia for a simpler, saner era.
Round numbers are a reason for reflection. It was 15 years ago exactly, in mid-December 1988, that I made aliyah, but the move was programmed in me long before that. My parents are both Jewish educators who moved to Jerusalem when they retired in the late 1970s. My father told me a few years ago that he became a Zionist in 1919, when he was a 7-year-old boy in Valka, a picturesque town that today sits on the Latvian-Estonian border.
In preparation for the GA the 72nd annual General Assembly of the group now known as the United Jewish Communities of North America about 5,000 Israeli schoolchildren were asked to write letters welcoming the delegates to Israel. Given the U.S. State Department's advisory to avoid travel to our (sometimes excessively) interesting country not to mention the anxieties and trepidations of friends, loved ones, and the delegates themselves it was remarkable and praiseworthy indeed that so many of our American brothers and sisters (4,280, as it turned out) made the long trip to Jerusalem to shmooze with one another, make new Israeli friends, and, above all, to show their
I used to live in Los Angeles. After 10 years as a Hollywood screenwriter, I became addicted to high drama and moved to Israel, where I could experience it 24/7. Fifteen years later, I can say that I've seldom been disappointed. But it sure is nice to drop in on the City of Angels once in a while, to cruise down the wide boulevards, walk along Venice Beach, show the kids the house I once rented on Howland Canal, where I'd wake up on sharp blue mornings to the sound of quacking ducks.
At this season of the year, Jews the world over engage in what our tradition calls heshbon nefesh soul-searching.
Lord knows, I try to be normal. My third grader, DaniCone of Israel's most documented children, thanks to his father's peculiar professionChas started taking tennis lessons. I walked him down the block to the courts that were built by the British, according to the clubhouse cornerstone, in June 1947, less than a year before they threw up their
By now, practically everyone who knows who President Harry S. Truman was which I guess excludes a staggering proportion of the populace under the age of 50 also knows that he either was or was not an anti-Semite. In recent weeks, the following lines have been reprinted in countless newspapers, and may be found in 0.07 seconds by typing the words Truman Jews into the Internet's Google search engine:
On the 12th of June, Oona King, an MP from the Labor party who represents a working-class district in London's East End, published an article about her recent visit to Gaza in the Guardian, Britain's prestigious left-of-center newspaper. Not surprisingly, King's piece is filled with dismay and indignation at the poverty and violence and humiliation that are a way of life for all too many of Gaza's million-plus Palestinians, who share a small territory but
Let it never be said that all we do here in the Holy Land is stay home and worry.
This year we spent Passover not in Jerusalem, but in leafy Sacramento, Calif., my wife's hometown. The first night we had a sizeable seder for the extended family and a few friends at a kosher catering establishment. We had a private room, adjacent to the main hall, where a large communal seder—about 200 people—was being held. As we arrived
This morning I awoke to a wonderful new world, a world without anti-Semitism. Overnight, the age-old monster was slain, a casualty of cynical wordplay. All those Arab propagandists, from the newsrooms of Riyadh to the TV studios of Cairo, whose opinion-molding editorials and video clips and mini-series and cartoons revive ancient tropes of the monstrous, demonic Jew—global conspiracies, child murder, baking Purim hamentashen pastries (a Saudi upgrade from mere matzah) with the blood of gentiles—these people may be anti-Israel (understandably so, n'est-ce pas?), but they certainly can't be anti-Semites. And why is that? Because they're Semites, of course, children of Abraham, descendants of Noah's favored son, Shem.
We live in an age of anxiety—to put it extremely mildly. In the United States, citizens fear for their personal safety, perhaps as never before. Here in Israel, of course, such uncertainty has been a way of life for a long time. We're tired
When you've been in Israel as long as I have—I impulsively made aliyah 14 Decembers ago, at age 41, in the middle of the first intifada—you wish you had a shekel for every conversation with fellow American immigrants, ex-immigrants, or potential immigrants on the topic of whether it's better to be living Here or living There. Lately this
Last July 30, the Washington Post ran a front page article entitled "On Israel's Entertainment Scene, Regrets Only." It was a sad but familiar story.
Morning prayers have been held every day at Harvard since 1636. The college was founded in that year in order to provide a "literate ministry" for the Colony of Massachusetts Bay. Harvard's first president, Henry Dunster, was a Hebraic scholar who translated the Psalms into English. Despite the complaints of students—none of whom was Jewish—Hebrew was a required
This article first appeared in the October, 2001 issue of JUF NewsLike myriad Jews the world over, I sat in synagogue this Rosh Hashanah haunted by the horrific images of the World Trade Center, straining to find some spiritual solace. But mostly what ran through my mind were questions.
You know antisemitism must be in fashion when it merits a story in Vanity Fair. Just below the shapely left shoulder of Jennifer ("A Beautiful Mind") Connelly on the cover of the September 2002 issue, barely an inch above the teaser "James Bond Meets Halle Berry!"--what do we find, but the words "Christopher Hitchens on Anti-Semitism."
Friends and colleagues from the States have been asking lately, more than usual, what it feels like to live in Israel. Maybe it's a matter of comparing notes, like patients enduring the same illness. America has experienced an unprecedented shockwave of existential anxiety since Sept. 11, and suddenly, we Israelis and our cousins in the Old Country are united in trauma.
