Новости за 13.08.2018

When I touched down in St Thomas last month, I became the first Israeli representative to visit the U.S. Virgin Islands, and therefore the first emissary of the Third Jewish Commonwealth to meet the island’s four century-old Jewish community. More than making history, the three days there have helped me reflect on these past two years in New York, and about my position at the crossroads of Israeli and Diaspora Jewish life.

A long awaited reading and public appearance in Odessa by Belarusian Svetlana Alexeivich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in literature, was abruptly cancelled at the last moment this week in the wake of a threatening provocation. The cancellation of the reading by the most famous living Russophone writer, one who had been a staunch supporter of Ukrainian sovereignty in the midst of the ongoing conflict with Russia, was a serious blow to the city. Odessa’s literati and cultural elites have fantasized... Читать дальше...

The drains from my double mastectomy were flowing with a heinous Hawaiian Punch-esque blood-and-body-fluid combo, and I was in tremendous pain. Little did I know I was about to be in so much more, but in a shadowed fog of a worse anguish: The amorphous, harder-to-heal ache of emotional pain.

I never planned to mountain bike with my rabbi.

Nor did I expect that our 74-year-old Native American guide would, while coaching us—or more accurately, berating us—down a steep rocky ravine, end up imparting so much Jewish wisdom.

Continue reading "Judaism and the Art of Bicycle Riding" at...

For Yael Cobano, president of the Comunidad Judía Reformista de Madrid, or Reform Jewish Community of Madrid, the FedEx delivery she received on June 12 wasn’t just any package. Almost Cobano’s height, it contained a sefer Torah, a scroll that was to be CJRM’s Torah. “I cannot stop crying,” Cobano told me in an emotional WhatsApp voice message. “The text that contains our stories [and] our values traveled so far—especially for us.”

When friends heard that our daughter was marrying a non-Jew, some of them assumed that she would include some Jewish traditions in her wedding. After all, my wife and I are observant Jews, and I was a pulpit rabbi for 35 years. Surely, they may have thought, even if our daughter was marrying outside the fold, we would take every opportunity to make her wedding as traditional as possible. They were surprised, then, to hear that her wedding ceremony was secular, devoid of Judaism. “Why wasn’t there... Читать дальше...

A retired general and former national security adviser in nearly every Middle Eastern state would live in paranoia and luxury, with servants, bodyguards, hangers-on, and a few odd state or army-owned business interests to keep them busy behind the high walls of their compound. In contrast to his Egyptian or Jordanian equivalents, 70-year-old Yaakov Amidror, perhaps Israel’s most canny and influential security strategist, lives in a suburb of Tel Aviv, on an easily public-transit-accessible street... Читать дальше...