The Hebrew Revival Was No Miracle

Dara Horn for Mosaic

It took tremendous toil to produce the cultural rebirth of the Hebrew language. Let us give thanks to the toilers—and to their master translator.

For whom does Hillel Halkin toil?

After reading his magnificent essay in Mosaic on the life and work of Yehudah Leib Gordon, the preeminent Hebrew poet of the 19th-century Jewish enlightenment, I had the same thought I’ve had over and over again since I was a teenager: unending gratitude that someone out there has done the world a favor by opening up the genizah of Hebrew literature and curating its treasures. As usual, that someone is Hillel Halkin.

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Film scored by Eric Clapton depicts child of survivors’ three days in Auschwitz

By Lisa Klug for The Times of Israel   

Filmmaker Philippe Mora talks about his three visits to his mother’s ‘hell,’ which he documented with help from his longtime musician friend who co-produced

Shortly before World War II came to a close in the spring of 1945, Eric Clapton was born. More than 71 years later, the rock legend has composed a score that revisits that tragic time in history.

The music serves as the soundtrack for a very personal documentary film co-produced by Clapton’s longtime friend, acclaimed French-Australian director Phillipe Mora.

Clapton, friends with Mora since 1967, also co-produced the film, entitled “Three Days in Auschwitz,” which revisits the fate of Mora’s family during the Holocaust. The film debuted in the UK last week. It will also appear at the New Horizons International Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland on July 24.

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Ancient Jerusalem: The Village, the Town, the City

Hershel Shanks as published in Biblical Archaeology Review, May/June 2016

How Many Jews Lived in Ancient Jerusalem?

It’s made such an enormous impact on Western civilization that it’s hard to fathom how small its population really was—small compared even to the centers of contemporaneous empires to the east and to the west. Of course, I’m talking about Jerusalem.

Today many of us live in cities of millions. Very few of us live in towns of only thousands, but hardly any of us live in a village as small as King David’s capital.

A new study of Jerusalem’s population in various periods has recently been published by one of Israel’s leading Jerusalem archaeologists, Hillel Geva of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Israel Exploration Society. Geva bases his estimates on “archaeological findings, rather than vague textual sources.” The result is what he calls a “minimalist view.”1 But whether you accept Geva’s population estimates or those of various other scholars he cites, to the modern observer the ancient city of Jerusalem can only be described as “tiny”—with population estimates at thousands and tens of thousands during many periods of the city’s history. (In comparison, Rome in the century before Jesus lived is estimated to have had a population of 400,000 tax-paying males—so the entire population must have been about a million.)

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Scientists Reveal Jewish History's Forgotten Turkish Roots

DAVID KEYS for The Jewish Voice

Israeli-born geneticist believes the Turkish villages of Iskenaz, Eskenaz and Ashanaz were part of the original homeland for Ashkenazic Jews

New research suggests that the majority of the world’s modern Jewish population is descended mainly from people from ancient Turkey, rather than predominantly from elsewhere in the Middle East.

The new research suggests that most of the Jewish population of northern and eastern Europe – normally known as Ashkenazic Jews – are the descendants of Greeks, Iranians and others who colonized what is now northern Turkey more than 2000 years ago and were then converted to Judaism, probably in the first few centuries AD by Jews from Persia. At that stage, the Persian Empire was home to the world’s largest Jewish communities.

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How Whimsical Comic Books Helped One Couple Stay in Love — and Survive the Holocaust

Cnaan Liphshiz for The Jewish Daily Forward

As a Dutch Jewish couple hiding separately from the Nazis, Emmanuel Joels and Hetty van Son were literally drawn together by a comic book of Emmanuel’s romantic invention.

After narrowly avoiding deportation to Auschwitz thanks to a policeman’s tip, the young couple spent 2 1/2 years living less than a mile apart, each in the care of rescuers with ties to the resistance in the city of Apeldoorn, 55 miles east of Amsterdam.

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Anti-Zionism Is Anti-Semitism. Get Over It.

Recent campus debates teach us an important lesson about bigotry and how to deal with it

By Liel Leibovitz for Tablet Magazine

Is anti-Zionism any different from anti-Semitism? The question is probably the most accurate seismograph we’ve got to measure where one stands on the ever-tremorous political grounds we all walk when we talk about Israel. Not that there’s necessarily any right or wrong answer; civil, well-meaning people can make arguments on both ends. Yes, because Jews and Jewish life cannot be reduced to the national aspirations of the Jewish state. No, because anyone denying Jews, alone of all the world’s nations, their right of self-determination is by definition a hater. It’s not an altogether useless debate to have, but it’s not the debate we’re having.

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What We Lose As The Diaspora Shrinks

By Rabbi Joshua Hammerman, Special To The Jewish Week

Back in my lithe teenage years, I used to Israeli dance with the best of them — that is, whenever I wasn’t nursing a sprained ankle caused by my congenital flat-footedness. OK, I admit it; while I thought I was pretty good, I reminded people less of Rudolph Nureyev than those dancing hippopotami in “Fantasia.” In fact, it was my stirring rendition of a gushing water sprinkler in Hora Mamtera that convinced the Israeli government to go all-in for drip irrigation. But I loved Israeli dance nonetheless.

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