Sublime

The renewed search for meaning also stemmed from Israelis’ realization that peace was not going to come any time soon. After the devastation of the Yom Kippur War and the collapse of the conceptzia, Yehoram Gaon—one of Israel’s most popular singers—came out with a song the refrain of which was “I promise you, my little girl, that this will be the l

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.

A major factor in the colossal moral failures which made the Shoah possible was the nonresponse of the bystanders.

Judaism without generosity is a hollow shell.

Bialik was fascinated by the worlds of Western culture and the Jewish Enlightenment (the haskalah). A movement that began in the 1770s and lasted until the 1880s, the haskalah sought to reform the Jewish emphasis on tradition and collectivism and to import into Jewish society a more rational, analytical, intellectual, and individualistic way of lif

The lesson of the Holocaust was that in the face of overwhelming concentration of power, acts of self-sacrifice and spiritual demonstration had little or no effect on the murderers. Classic moral traditions—martyrdom in Judaism, satyagraha in Hinduism, the cross and turning the other cheek in Christianity—were shattered in the Holocaust. Nor did th

Mediated by the models of their culture, the Torah’s prohibitions become inscrutable decrees. Human dignity and human partnership are far more central in the rabbinic tradition.

Rabbi Greenberg explained that we lost 30 percent of the Jewish people during the war, but more than 80 percent of the scholars, mystics, and teachers who could pass on ancient traditions.