This is Total Bullshit: Scott Galloway Blasts Bill Ackman For Blaming Wifes Plagiarism Story on Anti-Semitism – Mediaite
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Harvard students file anti-Semitism lawsuit claiming school is a ‘bastion of hatred’ and say they’re being bul – Daily Mail
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Photos: Secret tunnel discovered at Brooklyn synagogue; 10 people arrested after brawl with NYPD – SILive.com
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Photos: Secret tunnel discovered at Brooklyn synagogue; 10 people arrested after brawl with NYPD SILive.com
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Israel-Hamas war: What is Zionism? A history of the political movement …
Posted By admin on January 13, 2024
As the Israel-Hamas war continues, theres been a lot of discussion around Zionism.
Put simply, Zionism is a nationalist movement that advocates for a homeland for the Jewish people in the Biblical Land of Israel. It is the organisation of ideas that actively sought and achieved the existence of the Israeli state in 1948.
Basically, political Zionism underpins the country we today call Israel.
Its a movement that encompasses a broad spectrum of political beliefs with common objectives at its centre. But perhaps more than other political movements, Zionism has evolved over time.
So what is the history of Zionism, and what has that evolution looked like?
Read more: On its 75th birthday, Israel still can't agree on what it means to be a Jewish state and a democracy
There are biblical underpinnings to Zionism, as religious Zionists often reference God promising the Land of Canaan to Abraham and his descendants the Israelites and renaming it the Land of Israel.
For various reasons, Jews decided to relocate to Ottoman Palestine towards the end of the 19th century. The first mass migration (known as the First Aliyah) occurred between 1882 and 1903. Between 15,000 and 25,000 Jews migrated, essentially doubling the regions Jewish population at the time.
However, the beginnings of modern Zionism are secular and constructed through political philosophy.
Although many Zionist ideas predate his works, Theodore Herzl is considered the father of modern Zionism as he was the first to set out its political aims clearly.
Herzl was raised in a secular Jewish household in Hungary. In Vienna, he had a brief career as a lawyer before becoming a journalist and writer of plays and literature. Initially, he firmly believed European Jews should assimilate into European culture, and he held this view for much of his early life.
But his views changed after witnessing antisemitic riots in Paris in 1895. He decided antisemitism was not something that could ever be defeated. Instead, he encouraged European Jews to abandon the continent and create their own national home.
In his 1896 work Der Judenstaat: Versuch einer modernen Lsung der Judenfrage (The Jewish State: Proposal of a modern solution for the Jewish question), he argues Jews possess a national identity that should be embraced.
However, he said, they would never be safe from antisemitism unless they lived in a community in which they were the majority.
In his diaries, Herzl mused about many places a Jewish state could take shape. This homeland would be outside Europe, potentially in Latin America. But by 1904, Herzl began to focus on the Promised Land (Eretz Yisrael) in the Middle East from the brook of Egypt to the Euphrates (in Iraq).
In the early 1900s, this area was controlled by the Ottoman Empire, and Herzl met with Ottoman dignitaries multiple times to lobby the Zionist cause.
Herzls vision is considered by many as eurocentric and colonial with regard to the to the native Palestinian population.
But given that Jews are also originally native to this land, the Anti Defamation League (ADL) argues that the establishment of a Jewish state in Israel is not a form of settler colonialism.
It can be argued that political Zionism exhibits both anticolonial and colonial aspirations.
On one hand, it seeks to give self-determination to the Jewish people in a land to which they were once native. On the other, given early Zionists were trying to convince European colonial powers to create the Jewish national home, it adopted some colonial rationalisations and often saw the existing population, both Arabs and native Jews, as inferior.
Herzl rarely wrote about Arabs or other native populations, and when he did, he mused about how much their lives would be improved by the best of European and Jewish culture.
As Jewish migration began to gather steam, Zionism became more politically influential internationally.
But as the first world war drew to a close, there were large geopolitical shifts in the region. The Ottoman Empires power was waning, and the British would eventually end up in control of Jordan and Palestine in 1919.
In 1917, in an effort to undermine Ottoman control, the British implicitly supported the existence of a Jewish homeland in the Balfour Declaration:
His Majestys Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.
The British would later renege on the declaration in 1939, saying it was no longer British government policy to support a Jewish homeland.
As British colonial rule continued, not all Zionist action was peaceful. Paramilitary organisations such as Ze'ev Jabotinskys Irgun and the Lehi (also known as the Stern Gang) conducted bombings and attacks against the colonial British.
These groups would perpetrate the Deir Yassin massacre in 1948, killing more than 100 Palestinians near Jerusalem.
But it was the rise of Nazism in Europe and the Holocaust that solidified Zionism as a movement globally.
Jews fleeing Europe to settlements in Palestine (then under British rule) led to the Jewish population rising from 50,000 in the early 1900s to an estimated 650,000 by 1948.
Jewish calls for a national home turned into calls for a Jewish Commonwealth with full sovereign authority over its lands.
The central goal of Zionism was achieved on May 14 1948, with new Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion declaring the establishment of the state of Israel.
The war of independence followed within hours. Some 700,000 Palestinians fled to the West Bank (then belonging to Jordan), Gaza (a part of Egypt) and the neighbouring Arab states. This is known among Palestinians as the Nakba; the Arabic word for catastrophe, and the point at which Palestinians lost the potential for self-determination.
Read more: A brief history of the US-Israel 'special relationship' shows how connections have shifted since long before the 1948 founding of the Jewish state
Over the decades, Zionism has changed considerably as new political questions raised themselves. With the state of Israel established, what should the state look like and how should it protect itself from its foreign adversaries?
One of these questions is: how should Zionism respond to Palestinian self-determination?
The annexation of the West Bank by Jordan and Gaza by Egypt after the war of independence seemed to answer this question in the short term. Israel offered citizenship to some Palestinians, who make up just under 20% of Israels population today. They are Israels largest minority and have often struggled with political representation and socio-economic outcomes.
But Israels swift defeat of Jordan, Syria and Egypt in the 1967 Six Day War changed political realities again. Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza, along with the millions of Palestinians living there - but they were not offered citizenship. This has left the Palestinians stateless.
This raised a question that has still not been adequately answered today: does an effective application of Zionism mean statelessness for Palestinians?
There are different schools of thought on this.
For liberal and modern Labor Zionists, factions that include members of the Yesh Atid party and the late former Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, the answer is no. They implicitly reject the idea that Palestinian and Jewish self-determination are at odds with one another.
For them, a political solution to the conflict is essential. For a long time they advocated for a two-state solution - the creation of a state of Palestine completely independent from Israel. The Palestinian Authority would transition into a state government with sovereignty over its land.
But some liberal Zionists have abandoned this idea, stating the only sustainable option is to offer Palestinians equal rights and citizenship in Israel, challenging the idea that the home of the Jewish people must be a Jewish state.
This is because of a combination of the failure to transition the West Bank and Gaza into a Palestinian state, and the contradiction of freedom for Israelis and statelessness for Palestinians.
Although the political power of liberal and Labor Zionism in the Knesset (Israels Parliament) has waned, it is certainly alive and well in Israeli civil society. For example, B'Tselem, the legacy of left wing Zionist Yossi Sarid, has been very active in documenting instances of apartheid and settler violence in the West Bank.
In short, Zionism does not preclude someone from being critical of the policies of the Israeli government.
However, for many nationalist, conservative religious and revisionist Zionists, Palestinian self-determination anywhere west of the River Jordan is a direct threat to the Jewish state. They, therefore, do not support Palestinian independence.
This form of Zionism has become the dominant form in Israeli politics today.
Under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this approach has transcended rhetoric and become legislation in Israels Nation State Law of 2018, which legally enshrines unique Jewish sovereignty in the state of Israel and settlement as a national value.
It is this kind of Zionism that has informed Israels response to Palestinian action - both political and violent - for decades.
It has attempted to justify the blockade of Gaza, the forcible transfer of Palestinians in the West Bank, bans on political speech, mandatory detention without trial, and disproportionate violence as policy solutions to Israeli-Palestinian tensions.
Read more: 10 books to help you understand Israel and Palestine, recommended by experts
After the Hamas attacks on October 7, ultra-nationalist ministers have become loud and influential voices. With the help of the prime minister, their brand of Zionism has ensured that a political solution with the Palestinians is out of reach.
Notwithstanding his colonial aspirations and attitudes toward Palestinian natives, Herzl made at least some attempts to reconcile his views with liberal values and democracy. In his novel Altneuland (The Old New Land) he envisaged that non-Jews would have the same rights as Jews in a democracy.
Contrast that with today, where the most powerful Zionist voices see liberal democracy and the Palestinians as an obstacle to security of the Israeli state.
Correction: this article has been amended to say the First Aliyah ended in 1903. It previously said the First Aliyah ended in 1901.The article has also been amended to reflect that Palestinians have never historically had self-determination.
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Israel-Hamas war: What is Zionism? A history of the political movement ...
Judaism – Rabbinic, Ashkenazic, Sephardic | Britannica
Posted By admin on January 13, 2024
The two major branches
Despite the fundamental uniformity of medieval Jewish culture, distinctive Jewish subcultures were shaped by the cultural and political divisions within the Mediterranean basin, in which Arabic Muslim and Latin Christian civilizations coexisted as discrete and self-contained societies. Two major branches of rabbinic civilization developed in Europe: the Ashkenazic, or Franco-German, and the Sephardic, or Andalusian-Spanish. Distinguished most conspicuously by their varying pronunciation of Hebrew, the numerous differences between them in religious orientation and practice derived, in the first instance, from the geographical fountainheads of their culturethe Ashkenazim (plural of Ashkenazi) tracing their cultural filiation to Italy and Palestine and the Sephardim (plural of Sephardi) to Babyloniaand from the influences of their respective immediate milieus. While the Jews of Christian Europe wrote for internal use almost exclusively in Hebrew, those of Muslim areas regularly employed Arabic for prose works and Hebrew for poetic composition. Whereas the literature of Jews in Latin areas was overwhelmingly religious in content, that of the Jews of Spain was well endowed with secular poetry and scientific works inspired by the cultural tastes of the Arabic literati. Most significantly, the two forms of European Judaism differed in their approaches to the identical rabbinic base that they had inherited from the East and in their attitudes to Gentile culture and politics.
In Muslim Spain, Jews frequently served the government in official capacities and, therefore, not only took an active interest in political affairs but engaged in considerable social and intellectual intercourse with influential circles of the Muslim population. Since the support of letters and scholarship was part of state policy in Muslim Spain, and since Muslim savants traced the source of Muslim power to the vitality of the Arabic language, scripture, and poetry, Jews looked at Arabic culture with undisguised admiration and unabashedly attempted to adapt themselves to its canons of scholarship and good taste. The cultured Jew accordingly demonstrated command of Arabic style and the ability to display the beauty of his own heritage through a philological mastery of the text of the Hebrew Bible and through the composition of Hebrew verse, now set to an Arabic metre. Since Arabic philosophers and scientists promulgated the compatibility of Greek philosophy with the revelation to Muhammad, rationalist study of the Jewish classics and defense of rabbinic faith in philosophical terms became dominant motifs in the Andalusian Jewish schools (in southern Spain).
The period of feverish literary creativity in classical Jewish disciplines as well as in the sciences in Spain has been called the golden age of Hebrew literature (c. 10001148). Jewish culture of this age was distinguished by the supreme literary merit of its Hebrew poetry, the new spirit of relatively free and rationalist examination of hallowed texts and doctrines, and the extension of Jewish cultural perspectives to totally new horizonsmathematics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, political theory, aesthetics, and belles-lettres. Noteworthy too was the frequent overlapping of the Sephardic religious leadership with the new Jewish courtier class. The unprecedented heights that the latter attainedisdai ibn Shaprut (c. 915975) as counsellor to the caliphs of Crdoba; the Ibn Nagrelas as viziers of Granada; the Ibn Ezras (Moses ibn Ezra, c. 10601139; and Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra, c. 10921167), the Ibn Megashs, and the Ibn Albalias as high officials in Granada and Sevilla (Seville)and the distinctions of these men and their protgs in Jewish and worldly letters restored the ancient integration of culture and practical life and expressed the identification of the Jewish elite with the biblical age of Jewish power and artistic creativity. The effort to recapture the vitality and beauty of biblical poetry stimulated comparative philological and fresh exegetical research that yielded new insights into the morphology of the Hebrew language and into the historical soil of biblical prophecy. Judah ibn ayyuj and Ab al-Wald Marwn ibn Jan produced manuals on biblical grammar that applied the results of Arabic philology to their own tongue and provided the principles of Hebrew grammatical study down to modern times. The anticipations of modern higher biblical criticism by Judah ibn Balaam and Moses ibn Gikatilla (11th century) were popularized in Hebrew a few generations later by Abraham ibn Ezra. In the revival of Hebrew poetry, liturgical as well as secular, that translated the new preoccupation with language and beauty into art, Andalusian Jewry saw its greatest achievements. Solomon ibn Gabirol (c. 1022c. 1058), Moses ibn Ezra, and Judah ha-Levi (c. 10751141) were the acknowledged supreme geniuses of a form of expression that became a passion with thousands the length and breadth of Spain. But the most enduring consequence of the new temper was the redefinition of religious faith in the light of Greco-Arabic philosophical theories. The exposition of faith in Neoplatonic terms by Solomon ibn Gabirol, the defense of Rabbinism using Aristotelian categories by Abraham ibn Daud (c. 1110c. 1180), the attack on the religious inadequacy of philosophy by Judah ha-Levi, and the epoch-making Aristotelian philosophical theology by Moses Maimonides (11351204) fixed philosophical inquiry as an enduring subject on the agenda of rabbinic concerns. Beginning in the 13th century, a new class of philosophers sponsored the translation of Arabic literature into Hebrew and of Hebrew and Arabic literature into Latin; they brought Jews and their thought into the mainstream of Western philosophy and gained for them the position of middlemen of culture between East and West.
The salient trends of Sephardic Judaism did not imply relegation of the rabbinic class to a secondary role. Rather, they shaped a fresh approach to rabbinic texts that paralleled in many respects those adopted in biblical exegesis. Strict adherence to consistency, systematization, and philological exactitude yielded new codes that often diverged from gaonic judgments. A digest of Talmudic law by Isaac Alfasi (10131103) placed the Sephardic rabbinate on a self-reliant footing and epitomized its method of getting at the essentials of Talmudic law by sidestepping contingent discussions. In this area too, it was Moses Maimonides who brought the Sephardic principles of comprehensiveness, lucidity, and logical arrangement to their apex through his code of Jewish law, Mishne Torah. Written in Mishnaic Hebrew, the work remains the only comprehensive treatment of all of Jewish law, including those fields that are not applicable in the Diaspora (agriculture, purity, sacrifices, Temple procedure).
With Maimonides, however, the pure Sephardic tradition came to an end, for the Almohad (Amazigh [Berber] Muslim reformers) invasion of Spain in 114748 wiped out the Jewish communities of Andalusia and drove thousands to northern Spain and Provence (a province of southeastern France) or, as in the case of Maimonides family, to North Africa and Egypt. Sephardic Jewry suddenly encountered a discrete, mature, Jewish culture that for centuries had been developing independently and along quite different lines.
The Ashkenazic Jewry, into whose communities the Sephardim had been thrust by political events, regarded their own heritage and the Christian world in which they lived from a perspective shaped exclusively by rabbinic categories. They drew their school texts and the values that determined their judgments from the Talmud and the Midrash. Sensing no intellectual challenge in Christian faith, which they regarded with thinly concealed contempt, they constituted for the most part a merchant class that lived in urban centres under the protection of ecclesiastical and temporal rulers but also under their own complex of laws and institutions. Except for mercantile relations, Christian society was closed to them, thanks largely to age-old ecclesiastical prohibitions forbidding all social intercourse with Jews. With the Arab conquest of Spain and the rise of the Carolingians (the dynasty that ruled western Europe in the 8th and 9th centuries), the 12-decade interlude of suppression by the Visigoths (589711) came to an end, and the Roman precedent of toleration and autonomy again became the rule. Merchants and rabbis moved from Italy to France and the Rhineland and infused new energies into the Jewish communities there. An indigenous religious leadership began to emerge at the very time that Andalusian Jewry was entering its golden age. The First Crusade (109699) unleashed a tide of hatred, periodic violence, and progressive restrictions on Jewish activities in the Rhineland, but the communities affected had attained sufficient resilience to reestablish their communal institutions shortly afterward and to continue the cultivation of their deeply ingrained traditions.
By 1150 Ashkenazic Jewry had established a culture of its own, with an indigenous literature that ranged from the popular homily to the esoteric tract on the nature of the divine glory. Study of the Bible and the Talmud was oriented toward a mystical pietism in which prayer and contemplation of the secrets embedded in the liturgy were to lead to religious experience. Significantly, the fathers of the Ashkenazic tradition were remembered as liturgical poets and initiates into divine mysteries, and the early codes of the Franco-German schools were heavily weighted with discussions of liturgical usage. After the Second Crusade (114749), the German Jewish mystics (also called Hasidim, or pietists) placed heavy emphasis on the merits of asceticism, martyrdom, and penitence, thus adapting to a Jewish idiom the features of saintliness then current in Christian Europe. For the masses of Jews, the cultural fare consisted principally of biblical tales and instruction as interpreted by rabbinic Midrash, the lives of scholars and saints, and liturgical poetry reaffirming the election of Israel and faith in messianic redemption. The chief vehicle of popular instruction consisted of anthologies from the rabbinic writings and commentaries on Scripture, of which the most popular was that of Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes (10401105), known as Rashi, the acronym formed from the initials of his name in Hebrew. For the more advanced student, Rashi composed a succinct commentary on the Talmud that achieved an authority approaching that of the text itself.
As living sources of law and values, the Bible and the Talmud had an impact on public and private, as well as secular and religious, affairs. Taking their cue from Talmudic precedent and from Christian ecclesiastical procedures of their own times, the Ashkenazic rabbis occasionally gathered in regional synods to enact legislation on problems of a general nature for which there was no adequate precedent in the literature. Among the most enduring of these measures were the prohibition of bigamy and arbitrary divorce and severe economic penalties for abandonment of wives. Of far more immediate concern to the average Jew were the circumvention of Talmudic prohibitions against usury, relaxation of prohibitions regarding traffic with Gentiles in wines, and adoption of severe disciplinary measures, such as excommunication, against informers or those appealing, in cases involving Jews, to the Gentile authorities.
A new religious trend began in Provence in the 13th century with the introduction into the Talmudic academies of a novel form of mystical study known as Kabbala (literally, tradition), which soon spread to northern Spain. Expressing gnostic doctrines in rabbinic guise, the devotees of Kabbala devised an esoteric vocabulary that reinterpreted the Bible and rabbinic law as allegories of the various modes in which God is manifested in a spiritual universe, access to which was reserved for initiates. The most renowned literary product of this new circle was the Zohar (The Book of Splendour), a vast mystical commentary on the Pentateuch by Moses de Len (c. 12501305); with later additions it became the Bible of Jewish mystics everywhere. Although some of the theological notions of the Kabbalists deviated from basic postulates of Jewish monotheism, the insistence of the mystics on unflagging ritual orthodoxy and on a nominal acceptance of the biblical text as divine revelation helped them avert the suspicions aroused by Jewish Aristotelians and Averroistsfollowers of the 12th-century Arabic Aristotelian philosopher Averros (112698)and, in time, even won for them the status of a rabbinic elite. Indeed, in the early 13th century some of the mystics lent their support to a campaign that condemned the study of philosophy as generating skepticism, latitudinarianism, and disrespect for traditional literature.
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Jewish American Heritage Month: A Commemorative Observances Legal …
Posted By admin on January 13, 2024
Jewish American Heritage Month had its origins in 1980 when Congress passed Pub. L. No. 96-237, which authorized and requested the President to issue a proclamation designating April 21 - 28, 1980 as Jewish Heritage Week. On April 24, 1980, President Carter issued this first proclamation, Proclamation No. 4752 External, for Jewish Heritage Week. In this proclamation President Carter spoke about the bountiful contributions made by the Jewish people to the culture and history of the United States. He also spoke of the significance of April 1980 in the Jewish calendar, which was the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Solidarity Sunday for Soviet Jewry, Israeli Independence Day, and the Days of Remembrance of Victims and Survivors of the Holocaust.
Between 1981 and 1990, Congress annually passed public laws proclaiming a week in April or May as Jewish Heritage Week, and Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush issued annual proclamations detailing important events in the history of the Jews. In 1991, Congress passed Pub. L. No. 102-30, which requested that the President designate the weeks of April 14-21, 1991 and May 3-10, 1992 as Jewish Heritage Week. In 1993, Congress passed Pub. L. No. 103-27, which requested that the President designate the weeks of April 25-May 2, 1993 and April 10-17, 1994 as Jewish Heritage Week. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Clinton then issued three presidential proclamations between 1991 and 1994 for Jewish Heritage Week.
Between 1995 and 2006, Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush issued a series of annual presidential proclamations designating a week in April or May of each year as Jewish Heritage Week. On April 24, 1998, President Clinton issued Proclamation No. 7087, which celebrates the many contributions of Jewish Americans along with the 50th Anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel.
Then on February 14, 2006, Congress issued H.R. Con. Res. 315 which stated:
Resolved . . . that Congress urges the President to issue each year a proclamation calling on State and local governments and the people of the United States to observe an American Jewish History Month with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities.
Pursuant to this resolution, on April 20, 2006 President Bush issued the first proclamation designating May 2006 as Jewish American Heritage Month. Since 2007 Presidents George W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden have issued proclamations for Jewish American Heritage Month. These proclamations celebrate the contributions of Jewish Americans and urge the people of the United States to learn more about Jewish Americans.
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Jewish American Heritage Month: A Commemorative Observances Legal ...
Rabbi – Wikiwand
Posted By admin on January 11, 2024
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A rabbi () is a spiritual leader or religious teacher in Judaism.[1] One becomes a rabbi by being ordained by another rabbiknown as semikhafollowing a course of study of Jewish history and texts such as the Talmud. The basic form of the rabbi developed in the Pharisaic (167 BCE 73 CE) and Talmudic (70640 CE) eras, when learned teachers assembled to codify Judaism's written and oral laws. The title "rabbi" was first used in the first century CE. In more recent centuries, the duties of a rabbi became increasingly influenced by the duties of the Protestant Christian minister, hence the title "pulpit rabbis", and in 19th-century Germany and the United States rabbinic activities including sermons, pastoral counseling, and representing the community to the outside, all increased in importance.
Teacher of Torah in Judaism
Within the various Jewish denominations, there are different requirements for rabbinic ordination, and differences in opinion regarding who is recognized as a rabbi. For example, only a minority of Orthodox Jewish communities accept the ordination of women rabbis.[2][3] Non-Orthodox movements have chosen to do so for what they view as halakhic reasons (Conservative Judaism) as well as ethical reasons (Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism).[4][5]
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Indian community activist in US welcomes move allowing diaspora members to contribute to Ram Mandir – The Indian Panorama
Posted By admin on January 8, 2024
Indian community activist in US welcomes move allowing diaspora members to contribute to Ram Mandir The Indian Panorama
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