Your blogs
Dexxy, a tale of a God-fearing dog
Melchett Mike
Feb 6, 2010What exactly do you tell a charedi (ultra-Orthodox Jew) when your dog has chewed your tefillin?
Dexxy had experienced, it would seem, a troubled first year. When I found her, nearly three years ago, lying on the grass outside my workplace in Or Akiva (Caesarea's poor neighbour), she was at the doors of doggy heaven.
There was something in Dexxy's eyes, however, which told me that she was worth saving, that she would make a far more loyal and stable companion than the Turkish woman who had given me the boot earlier that same week. And so it has proved.
Letter to Bibi in support of democracy in Israel
Rabbi Aaron Gol...
Feb 5, 2010Dear Sir,
A few weeks ago, I, together with my lay leadership, wrote to the Israeli Ambassador to the UK to express our concern for the increased intimidation of Progressive Jews in Israel. I am appalled that there seems to be an increasing number of incidents culminating in last week's attack on the New Israel Fund as being the cause of the Goldstone report, with a vicious personal attack on the New Israel Fund president and former deputy Knesset Speaker Naomi Chazan.
Our Congregation, its lay leaders and Rabbis are utterly committed to the State of Israel. We are proud of Israel's democratic processes and were heartened when in a Times Leader earlier this week, it was expressed reworking the words of Amos Oz: "Israel does behave considerably better than other Middle Eastern countries, even when it is behaving badly." We therefore ask that you personally and immediately take every step possible to stop the witch-hunt against NIF and Israel's internationally-respected human rights groups.
A Terrible Decision
Jonathan Hoffman
Feb 3, 2010http://www.solomonia.com/blog/archive/2010/02/cambridge-university-israe...
Benny Morris has made some robust remarks about Palestinians, because he was worried by the Intifada, as most Israelis were. But the idea that he is "Islamophobic" is absurd. He has taught Jewish and Muslim students alike. He is concerned about terrorism but he is not, repeat not, "Islamophobic".
And I have sat through countless anti-Israel meetings at British Universities, many of which have crossed the boundary into antisemitism.
Have faith in education
Geoffrey Paul
Feb 2, 2010It's not just members of the US rabbinate who have engaged in public spats about faith education. Another aspect of the topic features in The Times' correspondence columns today where Rabbi Aaron Goldstein, the minister of Northwood and Pinner Liberal Synagogue, takes a swipe at Rabbi Jonathan Romain, the ubiquitous rabbi of Maidenhead Reform Synagogue. What got up Rabbi Goldstein's nose was his Progressive colleague's expressed sadness at plans to establish a Hindu secondary school because, Romain argued, the Hindu community has been very well integrated into wider society and clearly didn't need a secondary school.
Hate disrupts protocol
Rabbi Aaron Gol...
Feb 1, 2010Humanity needs leaders but it needs leaders to help humanity to live in harmony with one another. The time for a colonial mind-set is gone. One people can not subjugate another. I do not believe that the vast majority want this. But they can be led, just as Pharaoh led his courtiers, into believing a destructive narrative. Humanity is not well served by extreme narratives.
“Progressive” .... Not
Jonathan Hoffman
Jan 31, 2010Yesterday there was a conference organised by a group called ‘Progressive London”. This was initiated by Ken Livingstone in 2008. Livingstone was the former Mayor of London who told me three times that Israel should not have been created and the man who, on the third occasion, told me with a perfectly straight face that the previous Chief Rabbi, Lord Jacobovits, had said the same thing- obviously wrong and indeed unthinkable [nb the link may not work, the JP is in the throes of changing its technology].
The only ‘progression’ of this Conference is towards a new government.
Harrys Place has already noted the weirdness of the speakers at this event:
The Israeli male, a philistine with a small pee
Melchett Mike
Jan 27, 2010Taking a Shabbes afternoon stroll through Jaffa last weekend, and feeling the effects of a liquid brunch, I had the sudden urge to relieve myself. And, spotting the wrought iron gates of a shack set back and largely obscured from the road, I took my chance.
"Zeh docheh" (that is revolting), Michal, my walking partner, hissed as I rejoined her a bladderful lighter, a (provocative) smirk of self-satisfaction emblazoned across my face.
Israeli women love a good hiss, though I immediately recognised this one to be symptomatic of the familiar female frustration that their anatomies – lovely though they are – simply do not allow them to do what ours can with ease.
Support Seismic Shock
Jonathan Hoffman
Jan 24, 2010
How is it for you?
Geoffrey Paul
Jan 21, 2010Do you feel under "constant attack"? Do you feel "more frightened and threatened than at any time in your lives?" That's what Jewish friends are telling Baron Mitchell of Hampstead (Parry Mitchell if you knew him before 2002 when he was ennobled) and it is what he told the House of Lords last week during a curious mini-debate on "Tolerance, Democracy and Openness." Lord Mitchell, chair of the Weizmann Institute Friends in the UK and the Coexistence Trust, which promotes good relations between Muslims and Jews, told his fellow peers that there were campuses Jewish students preferred to avoid and many instances on campus where stickers saying "Death to the Jews" were posted and removed only slowly.
Recalling the anti-Semitism that his own mother had experienced, Lord Mitchell told the House that "Before the war, some of our leading authors, poets and academics were openly anti-Semitic. Our leading public schools thought that they were being liberal when they imposed a 10 per cent Jewish quota on admissions. Indeed, some still do."
This woeful tale stimulated Lord Graham of Edmonton, a fellow Labour peer and veteran of the co-operative movement, to inform the House that: "One of my cousins is Miriam Stoppard. She was the daughter of my Auntie Jenny, who was the sister of my father, and she married Tom Stoppard. Her mother married Sid, who was a Jew, and they became Jewish. The other daughter, my cousin, was Hazel. She married Preston King and her daughter is Oona King. I am therefore fully alive to the problems of the Jewish race and sympathetic to the points of view that have been made."
If you are passing by Westminster on a cold winter's afternoon, drop into the Upper House. It can be very warming and there is rarely a queue.