Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Hazony
Read between
April 21 - July 20, 2024
According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, 52.6 percent of the Haredi community lives below the poverty line—compared with 8.7 percent of non-Haredi Jews.
Only 11 percent of Haredim report feeling lonely, for example, compared with 23 percent of non-Haredi Jews.
Like any chemical compound, each halacha is a compound of different elements.
“You, who completely believe in the gathering of the exiles,” asked Bialik rhetorically, “what is the means by which we bring in our scattered sparks? Tell me, if there is another means besides the Hebrew language?”
There are “original” Jews who are connected to the soul of the nation, and there are “translated” Jews, who live their lives not in their own language, but in foreign tongues….
In a survey conducted by the American Jewish Committee and Fondapol in 2022, fully 46 percent of French Jews indicated that they
“The real exile is not to be torn away from one’s country, it is to live there and to find nothing more of what made one love it,” wrote Edgar Quinet when he left France after the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in 1851.
the building right above the Flushing Avenue stop on the G train has a very large mikveh in its basement.
The Satmars, in other words, are one of the only segments of the American Jewish community that has really nailed the continuity thing.
They can teach us not to be too delighted with our own prosperity.
It was as if the Satmars had decided there was no point in sustaining one’s body in a society where the truly essential things could no longer be done.
When our twins started kindergarten, my husband sent them off each day with a simple but profound mandate: “Ask great questions!”
great physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi told about how his mother had paved his path of discovery: Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: “So? Did you learn anything today?” But not my mother. “Izzy,” she would say, “did you ask a good question today?”
My new favorite job-interview question is: What is your superpower that would never be listed on a resume?
(barely 6 percent of the world’s Jews lived there in 1948),
Writing in 2002, the Jewish historian Rafael Medoff has estimated the Jewish voter turnout in presidential elections to be ten points higher on average than the total American turnout rate.
That would change with Donald Trump, whose presidency was, it seems, committed to dismantling American democracy.
Surveys by the Pew Research Center from 2019 showed Israelis held among the highest view of Trump (regarding global affairs) among all countries surveyed.
There is something in the Jewish imaginary, he argues, that resists fantasy: “Whereas fantasy grows naturally out of Christian soil, Judaism’s more adamant separation from myth and magic render classic elements of the fantasy genre undeveloped or suspect in the Jewish imaginative tradition.”
And when one of us (Gil) created a Zionist anthology, The Zionist Ideas, in 2018, he searched for a single Zionist text that was purely defensive,
The real fundamental barrier, however, lies in administrators’ ambivalence about the importance of teaching Jewish history.
Jewish history education has the unique power to root our students in the story of the Jewish people and foster in them the passion to be a part of that story.
Simply put, idolatry is a set of lies about power.
During my years at IBM, we tried to encourage employees to work across department boundaries, but bonuses were set by each department. To win the bonus, one department needed to outcompete another.
Our community needs a “data commons” and a protocol to share information for the benefit of all.
At every JFN Conference, the Rothschild Foundation organizes a “F*ck Up Night,” at which the community’s most renowned philanthropists present their biggest mistakes and what they learned from them.
No to choosing childlessness. The number of children born to the average American is 2.3, according to a 2020 Pew Survey. For non-Orthodox Jews, it is a demographically catastrophic 1.4.
No to Jewish illiteracy. “Continuity,” Daniel Gordis has noted, “requires content.”
let’s turn to a 1959 KGB memo, which reported on the agency’s effort to analyze Jewish religious writings to better understand Zionism. With no religious background, and none in Jewish religious thought, KGB personnel ploughed through the Hebrew Bible and a dozen Russian-language Jewish prayer books. Their conclusion: Jewish religious writings are “permeated throughout with a spirit of militant nationalism and ‘spiritual racism,’” expressing “the racist conception of exclusivity and superiority of the Jewish people”
We have to acknowledge that today’s anti-Israel Left often draws on tropes, motifs, and explanatory logic of Soviet anti-Zionist discourse grounded in antisemitic conspiracy theory.
One part of the answer is that academia and the media have created an Industry of Lies,” as the title of Israeli Left-leaning journalist Ben-Dror Yemini’s
the Council of Europe explicitly recognizes the legitimacy of national states when their national character is based on the majority’s identity, as the Council of Europe made clear in its Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities.
Matan Peleg’s book A State for Sale: How Foreign Countries Interfere with Israeli Policy
When the pound of flesh is metaphorical, the demand is to mutilate one’s Jewish identity as the price of social acceptance and toleration.
“Tel Aviv is considered the first Jewish city, not because its population, homes and property are Jewish, but because she belongs to all the Jews.”
The great poet Hayim Nahman Bialik once said: “We will be a normal state when we have the first Hebrew prostitute, the first Hebrew thief and the first Hebrew policeman.”
“A Jewish book…is any book that a Jew wants to read.”
