Por Michael Ascoli* Dile eso al que hoy esté en campaña electoral: “cualquiera que gane honor humillando al prójimo no tendrá lugar en el más allá” (TY Chaghigà 2:1) … ¿pero de verdad los Maestros son tan ingenuos como para pensar que siempre seremos capaces de comportarnos de manera impecable, hablando bien del prójimo sin …
By Yaakov Mascetti* As a scholar of the early modern I am obsessively interested in the variegated modalities of individuality, together with the diversified forms of tension between the particular and the general. Naturally, then, the rhetoric of freedom and redemption which the exodus saga abundantly reverses on Jewish and non-Jewish readers of the Bible …
By David Bidussa “Fascism gathered many legitimate causes of social anger and it systematically turned them into wrongs, into constant oppression, and into denial of human values. If we may find an analogy to the present times, it lies in this double constitutive dimension,” explained Antonio Scurati speaking at the Feltrinelli Foundation in Milan during …
By Daniela Fubini* Anyone who is even loosely acquainted with the hi-tech scene in Tel Aviv has been at least once on a high floor of the Electra building, across from the three Azrieli towers that used to mark Tel Aviv’s skyline in times when 46 floors above the ground were a wonder and a …
By David Bidussa* There is an obsession that is becoming more and more trusted in the common perception: the obsession of things that cannot be done, and therefore to change the rules so that they can be done. This is because the current rules restrain, but rules can also allow, rules can endanger, rules can …
By Yaakov Mascetti* The inauguration of the altar ends a seven-day-long process through which Moses sanctifies his brother Aaron and his sons for their sacrificial work in the Tabernacle. As a completion of this process, the eighth day concludes a series of complex preparations for the building of a framework, both architectural and orthopractical, in …
By David Bidussa* When asked why he did not teach the history of persecutions towards European Jews and their destruction, historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi would answer: “I refuse to teach how Jews died to students who have no idea of how they lived”. The knowledge of living Judaism is a priority in the fight against …
By Daniela Fubini* So we go to the moon. We as Israel, as a tiny country in a bullying neighborhood, we as a people lacking big numbers anywhere but in entrepreneurship, we as the Start-Up Nation in fact. At 03:45 during the night between Thursday and Friday, 22nd of February, the tiny – him too …
By David Bidussa* Why does the Day of Memory – February 10 when the Treaty of Paris was signed – struggle to enter into the public conscience 15 years after its establishment? Why does that story of pain and violence fails to become public? Why, to the contrary and notwithstanding the many difficulties, does Holocaust …
By Yaakov Mascetti* The month of Adar is for me a moment of personal reflection, a niche in time where I can stop for a few instants and reflect. True, Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur have that valence, and they certainly are significant moments in which the collective may come together and reflect – but …
By David Bidussa There are few things that are worthwhile keeping in mind, especially today. Truth is a challenging process, not a ready-made product that someone else has already prepared and assembled for us.
By Anna Foa* The Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer (Chapters of Rabbi Eliezer) explained in chapter 25 that the people of Sodom made a proclamation that everyone who strengthened the hand of the poor or the needy with a loaf of bread would be burnt by fire. Peleṭith, daughter of Lot, was moved to compassion by a …
By Yaakov Mascetti* As I have been studying the topic of the “Stubborn and Rebellious Son” in the Sanhedrin Treatise of the Babylonian Talmud, the text has faced me with one of the most blatant examples of the rabbinical hermeneutical project, which is that of entirely re-reading the Biblical canon and, at times, gutting it …
By Susanna Calimani* Every December, the Weihnachtmarkt comes to Frankfurt: same stands, same food, same objects, same souvenirs, same locations. I know them by heart: there is first the flammlachs (the salmon cooked on the fire), then the gluhwein (the hot red wine), then the stands of super non-kosher whatever, then the candies, and finally …
By Daniela Fubini* After coming back from four years in the United States, aka the most service-oriented place on earth, I was once with my dad in a restaurant and the waitress did a terrible job. She was not polite nor kind, made mistakes with our orders and was overall not professional. I got really …
By David Bidussa* In Naples at the Umberto High School the students’ representatives are fighting over adding the song “Bella Ciao” to the program for a concert on December 20. “Bella Ciao” has never celebrated victory, but it has been sung as a force of changing history. The lyrics explain that people are hurt but …
By Yaakov Mascetti* The celebration of Hanukah brings the individual to expand the reach and quantity of light as the year reaches its lowest point. Yet, while the accepted rhetoric for Hanukah is that of the contrast between light and darkness, and the celebration of spiritual enlightenment vis-à-vis the dangers of cultural assimilation, a marginal …
By Anna Foa* We’re still commemorating the anniversary of the Racial Laws of 1938. Eighty years ago, a different law targeted the Italian Jews every day, while the Fascists cheered and all the others kept quiet. As we know, the people who remained friends with the Jews were accused of do-goodism – oops, I meant …
By Daniela Fubini* There are many types of double lives. Some are a bit sketchy, and usually involve a job that should not be known to the wide public: like many, I too know a few people who might serve in secret service or something similar, and they wouldn’t say it for obvious reasons, but …
By Susanna Calimani* The doubt gripped me for some weeks: the choice between going back to my random-thoughts writing and staying in my mourning silence. In the last months a vast assortment of facts stole my words, one after another: before a word of astonishment, horror, disgust could be pronounced, something else would happen and …