My thoughts then turned to Harvard undergrads. Imagine if you were an 18-year-old Jewish or Israeli student, or even a pro-Israel Catholic like me, and you wanted to study for your chemistry final in the Widener Reading Room on a Sunday morning. Imagine being confronted by this protest, obviously condoned by Harvard’s leadership and commandeered by the Palestine Solidarity Committee, the group behind the notorious statement that holds “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack.
Monday, December 18, 2023
U.N. Calls for Investigation of Deaths at Hospital That Israel Says Was Hamas Command Center
United Nations officials called for an investigation into an Israeli military raid on a Gaza hospital during which patients died and the armed forces said they detained scores of Hamas militants and recovered a trove of weapons and other military equipment, some of which officials said was hidden inside an infant incubator and a resuscitation station for newborns.
Israeli forces withdrew from Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza on Saturday after entering the facility on Tuesday. The U.N. Human Rights Office said it was calling for an investigation of what transpired during the raid, citing allegations from medical staff that patients had died because of the conditions in the facility.
How One Jewish American Family Wrestles Over Israel
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/jewish-american-family-wrestles-over-israel-2b8019f1?mod=hp_lista_pos2
Emanuelle Sippy, a 20-year-old junior at Princeton University who heads the campus’s Alliance of Jewish Progressives, came to believe in recent years that Israel is an apartheid state guilty of committing human-rights abuses. The war in Gaza has reinforced her views, and she has responded by participating in vigils, walkouts and other actions demanding a cease-fire.
Sippy’s father, David Wirtschafter—a Reform rabbi in Lexington, Ky., who attended rabbinical school in Jerusalem—aches when he hears some of her harshest criticisms of Israel. And Sippy’s grandmother, Carol Wirtschafter, who lived with her husband and children in Jerusalem during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, laments that Sippy has lost hope for the country.
“I think she’s given up on Israel,” she said. “That makes me sad.”
Language – At a Loss for Words
https://hamodia.com/columns/language-at-a-loss-for-words/
Among the casualties of the war are the very words used to describe it. As the words get repeated, the meaning drains out of them. Even words like brutal, heinous, horrific, monsters and atrocities have become anemic, feeble, lifeless …
Psychiatry Won’t Solve Our Mental Health Crisis — Only Politics Can Do That
https://jacobin.com/2023/12/psychiatry-history-trauma-politics-medicine-mental-health
In a New York Times op-ed titled “Mental Health Is Political,” anthropologist and historian of neuroscience Danielle Carr asked, “What if the cure for our current mental health crisis is not more mental health care?” Carr argued that the conversation about mental illness frequently elides and displaces politics, ignoring the collective social and economic decisions that give rise to mental phenomena like anxiety, paranoia, and depression. Often the prevailing mental health discourse “puts the focus on the individual as a biological body,” writes Carr, “at the expense of factoring in systemic and infrastructural conditions.”
GOP senator: Israel must accept two-state solution to normalize ties with Saudis
Arab countries will not agree to normalize ties with Israel unless Jerusalem agrees to a two-state solution, Republican US Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Sunday.
The comments amounted to a rare recognition by a Republican lawmaker that Palestinian statehood is a condition for the expansion of the Abraham Accords, a series of US-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and Arab states negotiated under the administration of former US president Donald Trump. They came as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was weeks into a public post-October 7 campaign in which he has vowed to block the strategy.
The Crazy Conservative Scheme to Make Trump Look Normal: Rehabilitate Nixon
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/15/nixon-trump-young-conservatives-00131637
“If we can rehabilitate Richard Nixon in a balanced and fair manner — or even if we can just create questions in the public discourse about Nixon and about Nixon’s presidency — then I think, by way of analogy, it will provoke similar questions about Donald Trump,” said the conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who published a lengthy defense of Nixon earlier this year for City Journal. “It will give us the kind of template, it will give us the precedents, it will give us the skills, where we can more effectively defend a conservative president against these kinds of attacks.”
Rambam and Agada
The Toldos HaPoskim notes that the Rambam does not differentiate between halacha found in halachic discourse in Talmud and readily decides halacha based entirely on Agada or midrashim
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Sunday, December 17, 2023
Poll: Most young Americans think Israel should be ‘ended and given to Hamas’
Majority of all respondents support Israel, but results from 18-24 age group show majority think IDF campaign ‘genocidal,’ while saying calls for genocide of Jews is are legitimate
Friday, December 15, 2023
Maharal against Azaria de Rossi:The other side of skepticism.
Not until the Renaissance, however, did the subject of Judaism’s critical attitude to its own traditions lead to an open dispute, when the Mantuan scholar Azariah de’ Rossi, also influenced by the thinking of Christian contemporaries, dismissed the Aggadot as unreliable, considering them an invention, whose significance was primarily ethical. Azariah was of the opinion that the Aggadot could not be considered history and ought not to be taken literally since they consisted of “fabricated conjectures.” His opinion, however, was reached on a basis of a comparison between pagan, Christian and Jewish sources.
The Maharal: His Approach, His Innovations and His Position as a Teacher of Posterity
The central point of his approach: interpreting the words of the Sages must be done in a similar manner to the way the Sages themselves formulated their statements. And since their words are very deep, and were not derived through an ordinary process of evaluation, they should be interpreted in a similar manner, with understanding and deep contemplation, and not through axioms. This principle is mentioned many times in Maharal’s works.
The Moral Decline of Elite Universities
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/12/interesectionality-american-college/676350/
Thirty years from now, Americans will likely recall a witness table of presidents—representing not top corporations in one single sector, but the nation’s most powerful educational institutions—refusing to speak plainly, defiantly rejecting any sense that they are part of a “we,” and exhibiting smug moralistic certainty even as they embraced bizarrely immoral positions about anti-Semitism and genocide.
100 years later, Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s hawkish Zionism sounds like a formula for peace
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/article-777940
One hundred years ago, in November 1923, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, one of the greatest leaders of the Zionist movement and definitely the one with the greatest foresight, wrote in Berlin a seminal article in the Razsviet (Dawn, in Russian) newspaper, titled “The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs).” His main argument was that in order for the Zionists to succeed in settling the Land of Israel and persist in living there, they must create an “Iron Wall” that will thwart Arab ambitions to eradicate the Zionist enterprise. It is worth quoting him at some length:
This is bigger than COVID: Why are so many Americans dying early?
Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf recently took to X to mourn the “catastrophic” decline in U.S. life expectancy.
But his post, which hit on smoking, diet, chronic illness and health care, ignored the obvious: People are dying in abnormally high numbers even now and long since COVID-19 waned. Yet public health agencies and medical societies are silent.
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