What does the Star of David symbolize?
As Israeli elections near, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak speaks out about the meaning of Zionism, a one-state vs. two-state solution and the kind of leadership Israel needs
Brooke Davies spent ten summers at Camp Ramah, confronted anti-Semitism routinely as a child in the South, and fell in love with Israel as a teenager. She also had a close call with terrorism, less than two years ago, when a young boy attempted to stab her in Jaffa. But when became a national leader in J Street U, she faced opposition from the Jewish community and even from those in her family. Now she is reconsidering her relationship with the Jewish community altogether.
Just as Daniel Deronda probes the limits and possibilities for women in Victorian England, it addresses a different set of concerns regarding Jewish self-determination in Palestine.
George Eliot’s ‘Daniel Deronda’ was written in 1876, 21 years before Theodor Herzl founded the Zionist movement—to the astonishment and delight of many contemporaries, and of many Jews ever since.
Sarsour, like the activists from the International Women’s Strike, is a committed supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that singles out Israel and Zionism for condemnation. This reflects not only a misunderstanding of Zionism but a violation of some of the most basic feminist principles.
There is no reason for the Jewish community to be monolithic in our opinions.
Babel in Zion:Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920–1948 by Liora R. Halperin / Yale University Press / 2014, pp. 328, $40
Who was Rav Kook, the first chief rabbi of Jewish Palestine? Many have tried to understand this complex, charismatic scholar whose embrace of modernism existed side-by-side with strict traditionalism. How to explain his contradictory mixture of tolerance and orthodoxy, nationalism and universalism, mysticism and activism? Kook was a poet, religious jurist, philosopher and communal leader. Was he a Zionist?
