Sublime

Mordechai Berkowitz, a blacksmith, established a workshop

the years of 2000 to 2004 turned Israelis into centrists. They agreed with the Left that creating a Palestinian state was critical for Israel, so that Israel would not continue to rule over millions of Palestinians. Yet they also agreed with the Right that creating a Palestinian state would put Israel in grave danger.21 They were stuck. ON NOVEMBER

After his father fell upon difficult times (another biographical detail common to many of the early Zionist leaders), Ahad Ha’am decided to move to Odessa, the hub of the intellectual Jewish renaissance to which he was so drawn. The sole Russian city in which Jews were permitted to live, Odessa was home to a thriving Jewish intellectual milieu; man

to be a Jew is to cry out, even when silence would be safer, easier, and more convenient.

which Zionists from Europe would bring with them, were about to clash with the tribal, clannish, local system of the Palestinian Arabs.

THE MIZRACHI “REVOLUTION,” JUST beginning in the 1970s, would affect much more than the music industry. Israeli political life, too, was about to undergo a seismic shift. The Mizrachim had long lived under the thumb of Arab majorities. They came to Israel when their host countries pressured or forced them to leave. Often expelled without most of th

These stories express the Jewish community’s two highest hopes and deepest fears. The first hope is that the Jews in this new place will remain part of the chain of Jewish tradition, and the second hope is that the local population will accept them.

effect, Mattathias was operating out of a covenantal model in which humans could not “leave it all to God” but had to initiate some action to save the Torah and the Jews.

The Jews who remained Jews, who remained faithful to the historical character of the Exodus, continued to insist that redemption could not be fully realized without social, political, and economic liberation as well as spiritual fulfillment.