Category
September 8, 2005
Community Briefs
Jews aren\’t the only ones fasting this High Holiday season.
Two other religious organizations, one Christian, one Muslim, have joined with a Jewish one to call on Americans to take part in a nationwide fast of reflection, repentance, reconciliation and renewal from sunrise to sunset on Oct. 13.
Q & A With Richard Z.Chesnoff
n his decades as a journalist, foreign correspondent Richard Z. Chesnoff has reported from around the globe, including the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Europe. Over the years, Chesnoff — a contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report, columnist for the New York Daily News and author of several acclaimed books, including \”Pack of Thieves: How Hitler & Europe Plundered the Jews\” (Anchor, 2001) — has chronicled such historic events as the birth of the PLO, the Vietnam peace talks, the 1967 Six-Day War, the fall of the Berlin Wall and, more recently, the rising tide of Islamic terrorism.
Playing Favorites
When I was a kid, I was a very important person in shul. My dad was not at all prominent in the greater society — he merely worked for his brother, selling toys and stationery as a wholesaler in Manhattan\’s Lower East Side, starting his workday at 7 a.m. and working through 7 p.m. every day, including Sunday. (Sabbath-observant, he got to leave midafternoon on Fridays.) But at shul, he was well liked, even loved, and was the vice president of the local Young Israel. He was very important there, and I got treated great.
Then he died — cut down by leukemia at age 45. At his funeral, everyone from shul attended and promised to love our family, to remain close. In time, though, the bonds loosened. There were fewer visits on Shabbat to our home; fewer invitations to others\’ homes. And then it happened. One Shabbat, amid 20 talking boys, I was singled out to be chastised — to be quiet. That had never before happened to me.
Remember Sept. 11 the Jewish Way
I\’ve always had a difficult time assimilating tragedy, and although it hit much closer to home for me, Sept. 11 was not much different.
Even though it touched people all around me, and I was definitely affected, it still did not seem as intense or painful as it should have been.
I sought the solace of my friends, and gave it as much as possible, just like everyone else in New York City. And although I knew people who died in the Trade Center, and others who lost close relatives and friends, I still only understood the calamity in my mind. It didn\’t really hit my heart the way it hit others\’.
Then I found a uniquely Jewish way to relate, and was able to come to personal terms with this tragedy.
Post-Gaza: A Time for Israelis to Reunite
The disengagement or expulsion has ended. But is this also the end of religious Zionism? Are there lessons we can and must learn that may enable us to emerge stronger from this most difficult period?
The first lesson we learned is that we are indeed one nation. There was no real violence, and there was even majestic fortitude and an exaltation of spirit displayed by many Gush Katif settlers and leaders.
On the other side of the barricades, only a small number of soldiers refused to carry out military evacuation orders, despite the charge to do so from major rabbinic voices; the soldiers and police behaved with incredible sensitivity and restraint.
It was heart wrenching but uplifting, a period in which I was both tear-filled and pride-filled to be an Israeli Jew.
Truth More Powerful Than Advocacy
With a copy of \”Making the Case for Israel\” under one arm and a blue solidarity bracelet on my wrist, I first entered The Media Line\’s (TML) Jerusalem bureau seeking an outlet for my pro-Israel passion.
Response a Disgrace — Not a Tragedy
We will be admonished not to make politics out of tragedy, but we have a responsibility to figure out what went wrong with the response to Hurricane Katrina.
Today, far too often, tragedy is employed as an incantation to ward off responsibility. (Try Googling the phrase, \”The events of today were tragic, but …\” to get a taste of what I mean.)
Tragedy is an idea we get from the Greeks — human life as a grand, hopeless struggle against our own flaws and unloving celestial forces that conspire to bring us down. Tragedy is a spectacle, provoking a catharsis composed, in Aristotle\’s phrase, of \”pity and terror\” in the spectator — but not outrage. To call something tragic is to take a stance of elegiac distance. The world view that produced the idea of tragedy also produced great thinkers and artists, but it did not produce prophets.
New Articles
Print Issue: Who’s Funding It? | May 10, 2024
Magen Am Expands: Strengthening Jewish Community Security in Orange County
Who Does Yom HaZikaron Belong To?
Campus Watch May 9, 2024
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.