The Zionist Left
If I’ve tired of discussing Israel, it’s because I can’t seem to write a post I haven’t already written. When I saw Leonard Fein’s excellent
In defense of secularism, shirts
Jews! Nudity! Brooklyn! Manhattan! New York Magazine’s latest cover story has it all. As is the case, I’d imagine, for most secular Jews, my relationship to Ultra-Orthodox Jews is conflicted. On the one…
Ashkenaz
Herzl was way, way off when he said that the Jewish state should use German and not Hebrew, Hebrew being, according to Herzl, too challenging. After day 1 of German class (the day…
Intermarriage in America vs. American intermarriage
Crossposted at WWPD. This Israeli news program about intermarriage in the U.S. raises an interesting question: if the goal was to show how there’s something specific to America about the phenomenon of Jews…
Politics and scholarship
Crossposted at WWPD. Last month I presented a paper at a UCLA conference on Middle Eastern and North African Jewry, so I was curious to see that UC Irvine is hosting one on…
What “Jew York Times”?
Crossposted at WWPD. The NYT Weddings pages are filled with page after page of couples getting married by rabbis. The paper’s most-emailed articles are often on Jewish-related subjects. And the city in which…
Banality and alterity
Crossposted at WWPD. First, Jews wishing to claim to be no different from other men did so by asserting membership in the majority, in the dominant ethnic group of their land. When this…
More Herzl, less hustle
Just got back from the Hadag Nachash (pardon the double ‘the’) show at Webster Hall. It was odd being at a Birthright event in New York, and a bit disappointing to exit not…
Boteach me something useful: Feldman vs. NYU
Cross-posted at WWPD. NYU must have a massive Modern Orthodox population. The huge auditorium at Cooper Union was filled with college-age women in long-enough skirts and guys in kipot. It was the same…
“‘Sache que, partout ou il y a de l’argent, il y a des Juifs’”*
Cross-posted at WWPD. The New York Times Magazine “Money” issue profiles a group of Jews who manage to be simultaneously rich, materialistic, and exclusionary on a level even Hasids would find baffling, thus…
“2 Days in Paris”
Crossposted at WWPD. What happens when a quintessential New York Jew meets the family of his non-Jewish girlfriend? I have no idea, it’s not as if any movies have been made about such…
Intermarriage and Gender, II
If the statistics are accurate, American Jewish men are not that much more likely to be married to non-Jews than are American Jewish women. We must then ask why ‘shiksa’ is a household…
Intermarriage and Gender
Cross-posted at WWPD. Despite a string of unparalleled scholarly and professional successes, Noah Feldman has been ostracized by his former yeshiva. He decided to pair off with a non-Jewish woman (specified as Korean-American,…
What do Egypt, Senegal, and Israel have in common?
Cross-posted at WWPD. It’s promising news that Sarkozy wants to bring Israel into the monde francophone. Given the rates of French Jewish emigration, someone’s bound to write a super-important Israeli novel in French,…
Why We Love Being Jews
Gawker posted a link to a short film about The Vision Forum’s annual Father and Daughter Discipleship Retreat. The event, in Georgia (South not former-USSR), includes, among other things, an opportunity for young…
Israelophilia vs. Zionism II
Here’s my response to the responses. First and least important, the latke-shwarma debate. Perhaps I overstated the case, but more likely I just failed to explain it. In Israel, just like in the…
Israelophilia vs. Zionism
Correct me if I’m wrong: The way Israelis see American Jews is in many ways a microcosm of how non-Americans see Americans in general. Israelis assume their American counterparts care about Israel in…
BBC explains it all
I was curious to see what exactly makes British academics believe Israel is the source of all evil, so I looked to see what’s on the BBC News homepage. BBC News has a…
My visit to Old-New Land
There should be a Birthright America, to let the never-left-Zabars set see Appalachia, the Eugene, Oregonians sent to the evangelical exurbs, and so on. Because much of the value of Birthright Israel is…
Ugh
Blogger Mobius at Jewschool seems to be bothered by the fact that Israel is not an 100% perfect country, yet American Jews have the audacity to throw a parade to celebrate its independence….
The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Yaakov
It’s time for a tangential response to the French elections. Yair Ettinger of Haaretz reports on some happenings in Marseille that could well have inspired a certain film: There was symbolic significance to…
Proof that Zionism ruined Judaism
Ah, Israel, the land of Jewish athleticism, Jewish militarism, Jews doing things other than (ahem) staying inside all day in somewhere like, say, Brooklyn, reading scholarly texts and checking their email. Looks like…
Passing
Ariel Beery pins the tendency of left-wing Jewish communities to self-destruct on Jews’ having made “the Holocaust as the pinnacle event of Jewish history.” I’m going to agree with him, for the most…
Eytan Fox at NYU
This evening, my favorite film director, and in his words, Israel’s most successful, none other than Eytan Fox spoke to a group of students and grown-up types at NYU’s Bronfman Center. The man…
The “new right”
From what I understand (or tried to, for a recent paper) the French have something like neoconservatism. It’s quite a bit like the US variety, except that its proponents are more likely to…
Ugh, natalism
I haven’t written for Jewlicious in a bit, but I do still read the blog regularly, and feel I have to comment: Rabbi Yonah’s post on war and Jewish babies was hopefully tongue-in-cheek,…
