Purim 1994 + 20: The Goldstein Massacre
Why is God’s Name Absent from the Scroll of Esther?
Rabbi Arthur Waskow*

[On Purim morning in 1994, “Baruch” [“Blessed”] Goldstein, an American-born Israeli Jew who lived in an Israeli settlement near the Palestinian city of Hebron — part of the Israeli Occupation of the Palestinian lands on the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem — took a machine gun into the mosque at the Tomb of Abraham. He murdered 29 Muslims prostrate in prayer in the place revered by both Jews and Muslims as the burial-site of the forefather of both Judaism and Islam, Jews and Arabs. read more

International Women’s Day : The World is Busy Right Now
Ayala Emmett

These are busy days for international politics. Putin’s move in Crimea and Ukraine and the European and American responses take up all of the media’s attention. Tomorrow, Saturday March 8 is International Women’s Day. But this is not a good week to promote women’s rights and safety.

It is not exactly surprising that there has been little attention to International Women’s day. There is a history of silencing or ignoring women’s rights or ignoring women who took active part in revolutions and wars and expected to be included. During times of social upheaval women have been told that their equal rights would have to wait for the revolution to be over, or for the war to come to an end. The promise to remember women’s participation in the public sphere (the economy, politics, military) did not materialize. When wars and revolutions were over, women who had been fully engaged were promptly reassigned to traditional domestic roles in places like the Soviet Union, China, and Algeria; in the United States women like Rosie the Riveter were sent home when the men came back from the war. read more

Hey, Zhonkoye (Thoughts about Crimea)
Peter Eisenstadt

What is my favorite Jewish Crimean song?  What is the only Jewish Crimean song I know? Its “Zhonkoye,” a little Soviet agit-prop ditty my ex-Communist parents used to sing when they wanted make fun of their former beliefs. Written sometime in the 1930s, in Yiddish, about a Jewish collective farm in the Crimea, it was Englished and recorded by Pete Seeger in the late 1940s, and it is his version that became well-known Here are the lyrics:

Zhonkoye read more

Putin Overshadows Netanyahu’s Meeting with Obama
Ayala Emmett

For those who would like to see a peace and two-states solution and for those who would like to see it derailed, the meeting between Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama got lost in Putin’s military move into Crimea and the crisis in Ukraine. The media was busy figuring out Putin’s

military moves, and Obama’s and European leaders’ responses; here at home criticism by Republicans of the president’s leadership drew much more attention than yesterday’s meeting at the read more

Beliefs and Disagreements
Matia Kam

David Ben-Gurion: on diverse views and beliefs in the state of Israel and on the Haredim, the Ultra-Orthodox and N’turei Karta who separate themselves from the state of Israel, a distancing that at times takes a hostile, anti-Israel turn. 1

“One can regret that such disagreements exist, but they need to be acknowledged, and those who […] genuinely believe in human freedom and the freedom of consciousness must treat with respect even beliefs that they regard as wrong or tasteless or false; no one has the right to suppress them, not to use the power of the government, including power that is based on a majority, to oppress heart-felt beliefs […] . We must give full range freedom to all views and beliefs […] read more

Ukraine and My Jewish Problem (and Ours)
Peter Eisenstadt

Two-thirds of a lifetime ago, in the summer of  1975, I visited Ukraine, or, as it was then called, the Ukraine, when it was a Soviet Socialist Republic.   (Why Ukraine lost its article upon independence has never been clear to me.) I was part of a Soviet Intourist tour. We spent several days in Kiev, and a day in Kharkov and Poltava.   What do I remember of Ukraine?  Kiev had wide and majestic streets, with very few cars.  It was raining cats and dogs in Kharkov. In Poltava we saw monuments to the battle of  Poltava, which, as you remember, saw the ambitions of Charles XII of Sweden come a cropper at the hands of the forces of Peter the Great back in 1709.   Everywhere we saw monuments  to the Great Patriotic War (that is, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union) and statues of Taras Svenchenko, the great 19^th century Ukrainian writer than no one outside of Ukraine has ever heard of. (The greatest 19^th century Ukrainian writer, Nikolai Gogol, had the misfortune to write in Russian.) read more

Our Judeo-Hindu Tradition
Peter Eisenstadt

I was distressed last week to read that the Indian government has banned Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History. Published in 2009, it is the magnum opus of perhaps the greatest Sanskritist and mythographer of our time. She is both a translator of Hindu classics (such as the Rig Veda) and a peerless analyst of world mythology. According to Doniger, she and her publisher had already made cuts in the volume (which is almost 800 pages) in anticipation of right-wing Hindu outrage at her work, to no avail. (However, as someone pointed out in the Times, in this era of e-books it can still be downloaded in India without too much difficulty.) read more