In “Searching for Our Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky” and “Six Days Without Waze” (part of the “Israel Vision Project,” Summer 2024), Nadine Epstein introduces Evyatar Lipkin and Nadav Salzberger, two moderate Israelis with opposing ideologies who stand for a promising bipartisan political future in Israel.
The irony of both books is that they replicate the intellectual sins they ascribe to Zionists—one-sided descriptions of Israeli actions, lack of self-criticism, and suffocating certainty.
The two million Eastern European Jews who migrated to the United States between 1870 and the outbreak of World War I had been preceded by smaller movements of Jews to America: in colonial times, hundreds of Sephardim who fled Inquisitions; later, tens of thousands of Central European, mostly German, Jews who came, saw and prospered phenomenally in the middle of the 19th century.
“They were the shining realization of the Jewish American dream, people who could load their plates with all that this country had to offer.”
The wedding was planned for October 7, 2023. Then the news of the attack broke.
“The Jewish refugees now had a possible path of escape, if only they could get across the water.”
The “Stew of Seven Tastes” actually has five ingredients, one of which is beef tongue, so it may just taste you back!
“Violence afoot. He wouldn’t move, but Grace… Said “Sit down, Honey” and he did and there was peace.”
“If G-d wanted to be a strongman, you would expect Him to make His presence ubiquitous,” writes Rabbi Tzvi Freedman. “Yet his PR claims He doesn’t even have a face that we can see.”
“Before emancipation, Jews did best when there was a powerful ruler and a “court Jew,” often a physician or financier, whispering in his ear.”
Examining the role that charisma, deception, scapegoating and even psychopathology might play in the way strongmen leaders attract a following and hold onto power.
