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

 https://www.timesofisrael.com/gop-us-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

Poll: Most young Americans think Israel should be ‘ended and given to Hamas’

 https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-most-young-americans-back-ending-israel-many-find-jewish-genocide-calls-okay/

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

Maharal against Azaria de Rossi:The other side of skepticism.

 https://www.academia.edu/2229809/Maharal_against_Azaria_de_Rossi_The_other_side_of_skepticism_In_Rabbinic_Theology_and_Jewish_Intellectual_History_The_Great_Rabbi_Loew_of_Prague_ed_Meir_Seidel_Oxford_Routledge_2012_65_76

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

 https://jewishaction.com/books/the_maharal_his_approach_his_innovations_and_his_position_as_a_teacher_of_p/

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?

 https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/4354004-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. 

Harvard forces Jewish student group to ‘hide’ menorah at night for fear of vandalism: rabbi

 https://nypost.com/2023/12/14/news/harvard-forces-jewish-student-group-to-hide-menorah-at-night-for-fear-of-vandalism-rabbi-says/

Harvard forces a Jewish student group to hide its menorah each night after its lighting over fears of vandalism that “won’t look good” for the Ivy League school, the rabbi of Harvard Chabad said.

“On our campus in the shadow of Widener Library, we in the Jewish community are instructed, ‘We’ll let you have the menorah, you made your point, OK. Pack it up, don’t leave it out overnight because there will be criminal activity we fear and it won’t look good’,” Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi said at a Hanukkah lighting Wednesday night.

U.S. Presses Israel to Begin Winding Down Gaza War

 https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/bidens-national-security-chief-visits-israel-amid-rift-over-regions-future-5f3e969d?mod=hp_lead_pos5

National security adviser Jake Sullivan pressed Israeli leaders to shift from a reliance on airstrikes and ground assaults in Gaza toward targeted military operations and warned that a protracted conflict would make the Palestinian territory harder to govern after the war, U.S. officials said.

Sullivan’s meetings with Israeli political and military leaders Thursday seemed to have made little headway addressing the growing rift between the U.S. and Israel over civilian casualties, the length of the conflict, flagging international support for Israel’s campaign, and the future governance of the Gaza Strip.

The U.S. is undertaking a full-court press in the region for the Israelis to begin to wrap up the conflict. U.S. officials have said privately the U.S. wants to see the fight end in weeks, not months, though the Biden administration continues to support Israel’s campaign to destroy Hamas’s ability to wage military operations or govern Gaza.

Putin Admits Russia Has Suffered Huge Losses in Ukraine

 https://www.newsweek.com/putin-admits-russia-suffered-huge-losses-ukraine-1852660

Despite the figures from Matveev, it is not clear that Putin was admitting to 363,000 lost soldiers. However, the figure does come close to the 315,000 claimed Russian troop casualties that were revealed in a leaked declassified U.S. intelligence document this week.

The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine claimed in a Facebook post on Wednesday that Russia had lost 342,800 troops since first launching its invasion on February 24, 2022. The U.K. military also estimated in mid-November that 302,000 Russian personnel had been lost.

The Nordic way: why the alternative Finnish approach to psychosis is going global

 https://www.positive.news/society/the-finnish-approach-to-psychosis/

In the 1980s, Finnish psychiatrists developed an approach to treating mental illness that dramatically improved outcomes for those in crisis. As a five-year study of ‘open dialogue’ nears completion in the UK, Alex Riley – whose family has seen our mental healthcare system at close quarters – meets the doctors who believe the results could revolutionise treatment of mental illness in Britain, and beyond