By Susanna Calimani* My latest troubling thought regards the modern paradox of mobility: as horses turned first into carriages, then into cars, trains, planes and ultra-fast trains; weeks and days of exhausting travel turned into hours, and hours into minutes. After decades of debilitating wars, to conquer territories, to define borders and create well defined …
Purim is a difficult day for me – the narrative of violence that enwraps the whole subject of the hidden agency of God’s hand, has made this specific holiday quite unpleasant in my eyes. Yes, I’ve had my share of self-aggrandizing slogans, usually due to a series of rather visceral reactions to the extremely violent …
By Daniela Fubini* One of the most puzzling things when I moved to Tel Aviv, finally at the sea level after my first, dry year in Jerusalem, was the fact that I could not hear nor see seagulls over the coast line. Everything else was in place: the beach, the thin and bright sand; the …
By Sergio Della Pergola* The bi-dimensional geometric form that best expresses the current geopolitical situation of the Western world is a spiral. If we look at it in a tridimensional way, it is a vortex. *Sergio Della Pergola is a professor emeritus of demography at the Hebrew University.
By Susanna Calimani* The other day I realized that I should put a Mezuza in the flat I am renting, because although it is temporary, although it is not mine, although I’m often travelling, that is, nevertheless, where I live. When I was a kid, I was told that the Mezuza is there to remind …
By Yaakov Mascetti* Identity is a complex matter indeed. And origins are an even more complex issue. And since I have, like many other people, problems with both the latter and the former, the redemption of the people of Israel and their passage through the Red Sea is always quite pertinent to me, and to …
By Daniela Fubini* Say you are a relatively new Israeli like me, less than 10 years in the country. Say you live in the Center, or as we call it here the “Gush Dan”. Most likely, the only red thing you would know about the South of Israel is the Alarm. “Zeva Adom”, the name …
By Pierpaolo Punturello* With a journalist friend, we found ourselves talking about Judaism and compromise, before a mutual friend and Teacher. Over the course of our speeches, we found ourselves stating that after years of youthful definitions when we would highlight how we were, respectively a “secular Jew” and a “religious Jew”, now that we …
By Benedetto Carucci Viterbi* As Jacob is buried In the Machpelah cave, also Esau’s head rolled into it, coming to rest on his father’s Isaac. Therefore, it is clear that his intellectual dimension is as such that he deserves to be there, together with the Patriarchs. However, there is a difference between those who work …
By Daniel Leisawitz* Joining a long tradition, President Obama, in the final days of his presidency, granted pardons and commutations to hundreds of people currently serving prison sentences, most of them for non-violent drug offenses. However, among the people receiving clemency is Chelsea Manning: the army intelligence officer who was convicted of leaking hundreds of …
By Yaakov Mascetti* As the father of two adolescents, I find myself thinking a lot about the education, influence, freedom of and control over another human being who is not me. Parenting is inherently complex, to say the least, because it entails, by definition, the human reproduction of the self, the multiplication of two adults …
By Daniela Fubini* The night they took down Dizengoff Square, I was there. Or at least I tried to be there. Turns out, it will take over a week, they did not make a nice, bold, resonating “boom”, and on top of everything else all the bars and stores around the round square will be …
By David Bidussa* Torture has gone again unpunished, if not in law, at least in fact. We can start with Aleppo. Although it was already clear with Srebrenica in 1995: our time is the time of perpetrators. The “never again”, if it ever existed, was just a truce. *David Bidussa is a historian.
By Susanna Calimani* The streets in Venice are paved with big rectangular stones, they are placed one next to the other, and they create a sort of irregular chessboard. It goes without saying that Venetian kids are divided into two subgroups: the line-walkers and the empty-walkers, that is those who only walk on the lines …
By Yaakov Mascetti* The story of Jacob’s only daughter, Dinah, is one of silence, violence, rape, forced love, abduction and mass murder, lies and truth, words and things. Dinah is, says Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch, a young, curious woman, who wanted to visit the women of Shechem, talk to them and interact. From the perspective …
By David Harris* I am a forgotten Jew. My roots are nearly 2,600 years old, my ancestors made landmark contributions to world civilization, and my presence was felt from North Africa to the Fertile Crescent — but I barely exist today. You see, I am a Jew from the Arab world. No, that’s not entirely …
By Susanna Calimani* Yesterday I went to the osteopath for the first time. I am often in pain with my cervical nerves and the doctor told me that physiotherapy was not enough. Out of all the osteopaths in Frankfurt, I happened to have an Israeli osteopath, he asked me whether I speak Hebrew, I asked …
By Yaakov Mascetti* There is a profound difference between passively accepting Divine presence and Divine commandments, and the ability to actively argue with G-d, point by point, wrestling with Him upon every single thing he imparts. But there is also a cognitive state in which man, empowered with the capacity to see Divine intervention, dialogue …
By Daniela Fubini* Reality check: we are a Middle-Eastern country slightly bigger than New Jersey which happens to be one of the smallest states in the USA. And we are not, last time anyone counted, the 51st State. Nevertheless, we discussed the recent American Presidential elections as if it actually mattered to anyone in Washington …
By Benedetto Carucci Viterbi* The Tower of Babel is the universal watch-tower over one-way homogenized thought. It could not but end up with the shattering of this insane idea. *Benedetto Carucci Viterbi is a rabbi.