ArchitectGuy on Israel

TIMES OF ISRAEL
America is over. I’m moving to Israel
by Rea Bochner
June 1, 2021

Last week, I watched John Oliver, one of America’s best-known comedy news hosts, take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I’ve watched him many times before (the Joe Exotic episode is a favorite) and I’m a fan. But his maligning of Israel as a perpetrator of war crimes or his distortion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict horrified me. Because that was when I realized that everything I’d learned about Jewish History was true. I’m no expert on the subject, but after 15 years of self-study, I’ve drawn a few conclusions: The 3,000-plus-year existence of the Jewish people is essentially a stretch of pogroms, expulsions, rapes, mutilations, public burnings, forced conversions, vandalization of property, demonization in the press, kangaroo courts, and the largest systematized genocide in the history of mankind. Sure, we’ve had our peaceful stretches, but they were commercial breaks, not the regularly scheduled program. READ MORE

ALGEMEINER
The Deafening Silence of Jewish Celebrities on Israel
by Shmuley Boteach
May 25, 2021

For the past few days, we at the World Values Network, have been locked in an epic and global battle with media and singing superstar Dua Lipa. The British entertainer maligned Israel as an apartheid state, guilty of ethnic cleansing, and we responded with a full-page ad in last Saturday’s New York Times…An Israeli TV news magazine was interviewing me about the ad and the global reaction when they put this question to me: “Why do the Palestinians have so many celebrities with hundreds of millions of followers on social media who strongly support them, while we in Israel don’t have even one?” Good question. I didn’t have an answer. READ MORE

JNS Andrew Lappin: Why weren’t more organized voices supporting Israel? It’s time for our communal leaders to stop checking the boxes of platitudinous statements, and instead, vociferously call out anti-Semitism for what it is.

JERUSALEM POST Shmuley Boteach: Are US Jewish groups ashamed to support Israel? Let’s finally organize a Jewish march on DC for Israel. Let’s do it, God willing, in the next two weeks. Let’s stop with the excuses.

JERUSALEM POST
The fracturing of liberal Judaism over Jewish particularism
by Amiel Hirsch
May 27, 2021

It has been unfolding slowly for decades, but the recent war between Israel and Hamas highlighted and accelerated our crisis. We are breaking along the same fissures as a century ago. The fault line is, as it was back then, our sense of Jewish identity. Do we belong to the Jewish people? Are we anchored in Jewish particularism – an identity rooted in Jewish peoplehood – and from there, do we pursue Jewish universal values of social repair? Or are we Kantian universalists who pray in Hebrew, and who regard the insistence on Jewish distinctiveness as an embarrassment at best or, at worst, an impediment to and a contradiction of universal values? READ MORE