Moment
At every Passover seder of my childhood, my father Gershon Glausiusz would break the middle matzah, as the Haggadah instructed, place one half in an embroidered bag, and fling the bag over his shoulder, saying, “This is how we carried our possessions when we went into exile.” He was talking of his own deportation…
Like fanfic authors today, Franklin extended a beloved text in a direction that fulfilled his vision of it, that satisfied his questions and fired his imagination. In other words, he wrote midrash.
The core idea behind that operation, and many others to follow, was the belief that we Israelis can solve our dispute with the Palestinians by first vanquishing them in the battlefield. If only we’ll be stronger militarily—if not morally—the problem will somehow solve itself. Of course, it never did.
As the 2018 edition of the festival wound to a close last week, we asked Sara Nodjoumi, the festival’s artistic director and producer of The Iran Job, among other films, to tell us about her favorite Sephardic films.
In The City Where Myths Are Made, The Israeli And Palestinian Storyline Is Always In Rewrite.
Although a work of fiction, Mapping the Bones has enough of a historical basis to make it read like a convincing survivor’s account, one that does the essential work of bearing witness to a tattered and bloody past.
Brenner’s In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea chronicles the competing ambitions to preserve and nourish Jews and Judaism in safety, embraced by an array of Jewish thinkers and leaders from the late 19th century into the present. Would it be by assimilating into the dominant culture, as the Jewish German foreign minister Walther Rathenau argued?
Ellen Wexler
For many Jews, Passover is about what you can’t eat. Those who observe the holiday’s dietary rules must avoid chametz: wheat, rye, spelt, barley or oats. But because these ingredients—with the exception, sometimes, of oats—also happen to be the primary sources of gluten in our food, the Passover diet and the gluten-free diet actually look a lot alike.
It’s been a roller-coaster two weeks for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—from the triumph of AIPAC to the discontent and rancor at home in Jerusalem.
Naomi Ragen
We need to bear witness to the Talmudic dictum, “The poor people living in your own city come first.”
