General News

The Miracle of Chanukah Solstice

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Last night, a miracle occurred for this Pagan-Jewish girl: the Winter Solstice and the first night of Chanukah, sacred holidays devoted to the coming back of the light, happened on the same night.
Last year’s Winter Solstice coincided with a full lunar eclipse for the first time in 400 years, and in that moment I felt a tremendous shifting of the energies of the planet and a powerful, beautiful dawning of a new era. This year has indeed proven to be one of seemingly unimaginable shifts and a global social awakening unlike anything we’ve seen before, which left me wondering – what does the synchronistic alignment of these two holy days portend for the coming year?

General News

Chanukah's History: Challenging but Full of Meaning

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The history of Chanukah squeezes us between two competing narratives: one of idealization and one of consternation. The former encourages us to view Chanukah as a holiday of liberation, when the Maccabees overthrew their Hellenistic occupiers in pursuit of faith and freedom. The Jews wanted a homeland free of outside ruler and were willing to pick up arms in self-defense. The latter emphasizes the un-miraculous nature of the conflict and the fact that, when ‘free’ during the Hasmonean period (which followed the Maccabean conquest), Jewish leaders at times engaged in programs of forced conversion and other unsavory acts. Freedom from Hellenistic domination did not liberate Jews from internal strife and harsh rulers.

General News

Chanukka: On Jews, Greeks and Germans

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…the cultural choices one must choose between can be evaluated by criteria: by their effect upon the spirit.There are cultural and existential choices that bring hearts together, and there are those that lead to arrogance and aggression. The same great modes of thinking that bring about the greatest steps forward in human development can sometimes be accompanied by ideas that lead to the greatest suffering. Chanukka is meant to be about choosing the former, and rejecting the latter…

General News

Bus Halted in Israel When Woman Refuses Ultra-Orthodox Demand to Sit in the Back of the Bus

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In a scene that could have been lifted from Montgomery, Alabama in the 1950s, a public bus was halted in Israel on Friday when an ultra-Orthodox man boarded and demanded that Tanya Rosenblit, commuting to Jerusalem for work, get up and move to the rear. She refused, at which point the offending man told the bus driver that “it was his right to have her sit in the back and that he had paid to be able to do so.” He then pried open the doors, refusing to allow the bus to continue, at which point the driver called police. When an officer arrived and approached Rosenblit, his first words weren’t empathic notes of comfort, nor were they chagrined articulations of an apology. Instead, the officer asked if she might, you know, respect the man’s wishes and move to the back.

General News

FUTURE HEADLINE: American Soldiers Seize & Detain U.S. Citizens as Police Block Press From Scene

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How has it come to this? How is it possible that President Obama will be the one to codify, for the first time since the McCarthy era, the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens? I will get to the answer. However, first, let me defend the title of this post by making clear that the revised National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) set to be signed by Obama – called “an astonishing attack on our civil liberties” by Sam Seder – indeed legislatively grants the U.S. military the authority to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens on American soil without a trial or charge. While this codified detention authority is intended to be used on terror suspects, the categories of those who can be detained are so slippery and amorphous that they could, in the future, be potentially applied to anyone.

General News

Christians United For Israel: Israel's Mistaken Embrace

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When so many citizens and governments of so many countries regularly bathe in an anti-Israel bias, why would Israel ever reject a loving embrace? Christians United For Israel (CUFI), founded in 2006, is now the largest pro-Israel (see Israel’s pro-Israel definition) group anywhere in the known universe and afterlife — over 500,000 strong and bountifully multiplying. All committed and loyally engaged in their Biblical struggle to defend the home team by enlisting, along with AIPAC, Israel’s much smaller Jewish quarterback, as Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s American blocking back and unofficial coalition party member. Just as Netanyahu feels he speaks for generations of Jews, as he proclaimed before Congress in May, Pastor John Hagee, CUFI’s leader, has proclaimed to speak for all right-thinking evangelical Christians — evangelical Christians who know that Jews are God’s chosen title holders to all of pre-1947 Palestine: In July, while speaking at the sixth annual CUFI summit in Washington, D.C., he said, “The land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people….they own the land of Israel!  The boundaries…are given exactly in the Bible.”