L'shanah tovah 5769

Wishing everyone a good and sweet new year!

Shanah tovah in Baghdad

Yochi Dreazen is the Wall Street Journal's occasional Baghdad reporter. He spent Rosh Hashanah 2007 at a US army base near Baghdad and wrote this moving account. This version is published by Point of No Return, a very interesting blog about the forgotten Jews and Jewish refugees of the Middle East.

POSTSCRIPT: Here is an interesting article on that Iranian fictionalized television drama of the Holocaust, loosely based on the life of the Iranian diplomat Abdol Hossein Sardari. Several analysts reviewing the Farsi original have traced out clear anti-Zionist themes and several standard tropes of anti-Israel propaganda, and a disturbing implication of Jews as corrupt.

You might wonder where that "Zionism is racism" garbage, as well as the more subtle attempts to divide Jews from Jewish nationalism, come from. The first is a legacy of three+ decades of Soviet propaganda, unabashedly anti-Zionist and antisemitic. The second is a standard theme of both far Left and Islamic-oriented propaganda. An upcoming posting will explore the origins of these and other antisemitic concepts in the long, unique, and now defunct experiment of the Jewish diaspora, which created a distorted and untenable combination of simultaneous achievement and survival with exceptional powerlessness. Antisemitism and Jewish powerlessness coexist in symbiosis. But attempts to end that powerlessness and normalize Jewish life also provoke frenzied resistance from certain quarters, including some Jewish ones.

Thoughts for Elul

It's Elul, that last month in the Jewish year before Tishrei and Rosh Hashanah and time for introspection.

There's a grain of truth in the observation that Judaism is more about practice than belief, but it's no more than a half-truth. World Jewish Digest recently sponsored a forum with four authors on the question, "What Do Jews Believe?" All four responses are worth reading, but the response of Niles Elliot Goldstein is the best, getting right to the center of the issue and clearing away a lot of confusion. He coins a phrase, "skeptical theism," that captures Judaism perfectly. He also the only one of the four respondents to get the all-important distinction between faith and belief right. And he doesn't sidestep the question with that cliché about "Judaism is practice, not faith." As they say, read the whole thing.

L'shanah tovah!

L'shanah tovah u-metukah

It's Erev Rosh Hashanah 5767. A sweet and good new year to everyone!

More soon.