From the Archives | Digging Deep for David’s Palace
This article was originally published in the October 2005 issue of Moment. It was Friday afternoon in Jerusalem. The
This article was originally published in the October 2005 issue of Moment. It was Friday afternoon in Jerusalem. The
Moment checks in with four participants from our Jewish Political Voices Project to ask for their reflections on this dramatic day.
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The progress of equality is arguably the mainspring of modern political history. Alexis de Tocqueville considered the spread of equality to be the inexorable tendency of Western societies, and the 20th-century wars with Nazism and Communism can be interpreted as struggles over the principle’s validity and scope: Nazism fought to establish racial hierarchy in place of equality, while Communism fought to extend equality to the economic sphere, at least in theory.
“Wherever she sat and led the discussion, there was the head of the table.” Thus observed an early associate of Henrietta Szold’s in Hadassah, the powerhouse American women’s Zionist organization that she founded in 1912.
For liberal supporters of Israel, the unresolved status of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza presents a dilemma: a choice between a single state with so many Arab citizens as to inevitably dilute the Jewish character of the country, or the insistence of control over but denial of equal rights to millions of Palestinians, diluting if not destroying Israel’s democratic character.
Everyone wants to be right—in the right way. What’s the line between striving for moral perfection and being a jerk?
It’s incompatible with the essence of a liberal arts education.
In this time of corrective unnamings—to remove traces of admiration or gratitude for the morally reevaluated—the names of unrepentant slaveholders, Confederate generals, contemporary sexual predators and other assorted wrongdoers have been erased or proposed for erasure from college dorms, military bases, city streets and more.
Dina Gold reviews the new German language documentary Final Account with never before seen testimony from the last generation of WWII.
David Duke established another life for himself in Austria—and remained undisturbed in his Alpine paradise.