Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/author/a_ezrahis/)
A short, compelling history of the place of idols and idol-smashing in cultures ranging from ancient Mesopotamia to ISIS in current Mosul. A sobering assessment not only of violent acts of iconoclasm but of the myriad ways that museums, videos, and algorithms shape our civic conversations.
Wisdom for the ten days of t’shuvah.
Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi reviews Stephen Mitchell’s Joseph and the Way of Forgiveness—a novelistic version of the Biblical story of Joseph—whose message is one of compassion and gratitude.
In a time when negotiations between Israel and Palestine are particularly fraught, we remember how two people were able to create dialogue between people who were often at each other’s throats.
In a time when negotiations between Israel and Palestine are particularly fraught, we remember how two people were able to create dialogue between people who were often at each other’s throats.
URGENT APPEAL TO THE READERS OF TIKKUN from Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi
There are times when one confronts a non-negotiable moral duty. This is one of those times.
I suspect that most readers of Tikkun in Israel, in America and in Europe, have worn out several pairs of shoes over the decades protesting injustices carried out by their own governments. Something more is demanded of us now. For those of us in Israel, that may mean a serious disruption of our personal lives.
I am writing this by the bedside of my ninety-eight-year old mother, watching the life forces slowly ebb. It is a strange privilege, the fear of the inevitable and the sorrow of anticipated loss mingled with gratitude for so many years of presence and a minimum of pain in this twilight time. On the table beside the hospital bed on which Mom lies, rests Eitan Fishbane’s Shadows in Winter: a Memoir of Love and Loss. Eitan is my nephew and Mom’s grandson. In 2007, his wife, Leah, was two months pregnant when she died suddenly at the age of thirty-two of an undetected brain tumor, leaving her husband and a four-year-old daughter.
The search for an aesthetic and epistemological language of representation out of the shards of lives that were destroyed first by “progress” and then by two world wars becomes increasingly elusive and desperate. “Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz” by Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer is one of the most eloquent culminations of that search and a powerful indicator of the physical and cultural traces that survive into the twenty-first century.