Sublime

Peaceful mass protests began. The best known was Motti Ashkenazi’s lone demonstration across from the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem, where he held a sign that read: “Grandma [the nickname given to Prime Minister Golda Meir], your defense minister is a failure and 3,000 of your grandchildren are dead.”28 Prior to the war, speaking that way

While Tuvia was agonizing about what to do, two of his partisans, Michal Mechlis and Akiva Szymonowicz, came up with an answer.

tendency within the group, which saw itself as attempting to find light within the shadows and to connect with what Yungman called a “nation that is not yet a nation, but erev rov fun shvotim [a multitude of tribes].”

ONE MAJOR DEVELOPMENT WAS the rise of the Mizrachim to a place of social and cultural prominence in Israeli life. Mizrachi religiosity had always manifested itself differently than the philosophically more rigid Ashkenazi variety, and now secular Israelis were being exposed to its worldview. Mizrachi Jews admired rabbis more than their Ashkenazi co

Brenner, complex though he was, was perhaps the cultural icon of the Second Aliyah. His work, still considered brilliant, surfaced issues with which Israel continues to wrestle. He would have undoubtedly done even more than he managed in his brief life, but he was murdered by an Arab mob in the 1921 Jaffa riots.

After the publication of Herzl’s Altneuland in 1902, the battle between Herzl and Ahad Ha’am (who was by then Herzl’s most vociferous critic) grew even uglier. But just a year later, the pogrom in Kishinev led even the apolitical Ahad Ha’am to back off—everyone understood that the Jewish people needed to set aside differences and to prepare a way t

Caring-for may be impossible, but caring-about need not be.

Having lost his support in the Knesset, Barak called for elections to be held in February 2001. Israeli Arabs boycotted the elections as a reaction to the events of October 2000, which further weakened the Left. Barak lost, and Ariel Sharon, heading the right-wing Likud party, was elected to replace him. Once again, Palestinian violence had returne