Words of the Week: Giveaway Edition
Update, May 19: Thanks to all who entered this giveaway! The Random Number Generator has awarded the giveaway subscription to Michele J. Clark. (Michele, I’ll be in touch shortly to confirm your address.)
Normally, “Words of the Week” posts here on My Machberet share snippets from online discoveries that I’ve found to be particularly powerful. Often, these Jewishly-focused items are also Israel-focused.
In honor of Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzmaut, the back-to-back holidays that take place this week, I’d like to do something a little different with this post: I want to offer to sponsor one subscription to Daniel Gordis’s Israel from the Inside, where I so often encounter meaningful, enlightening commentary that I can’t necessarily share—because so much of it is for paid subscribers only.
(A caveat: Israel from the Inside provides both text and audio content; I have not been able to locate transcripts for the audio. I continue to encourage all podcasters/anyone who provides audio content to make that material fully accessible. My only reservation about sponsoring this giveaway is, in fact, that some of the material is only partially accessible. If I didn’t believe that even the text-only content is worth “gifting”—and, frankly, if there were other subscriptions providing equal value—I wouldn’t be proceeding as I am.)
If you’re unfamiliar with Israel from the Inside, do go check out the material that is public. And then, if you’d like to have your name entered for this giveaway, please leave a comment below. I’m going to let this offer run for a little while to give myself a chance to spread the word. Based on the number of entrants, I’ll use a random number generator to select the winner on May 18.
And if, like me, you’re already a subscriber to Israel from the Inside, and you wish that others were, too, please do share this post!
I would love a subscription. I am so upset about a Forward article today that surmised the BDS point of view was going to start being common throughout U.S. colleges…the left can be as blind as the right – don’t I already know this? I have to keep re-learning it.
Thanks! I appreciate your newsletter.
What a thoughtful giveaway–and one that has become even more poignant over the last few days. My Hebrew teacher growing up was Israeli and she was like a second mother to me. She put the language and the country in a very special place in my heart. Now, as an adult steeped in Yiddish literature and history, however, I have to concede that, were this again *19*22, I would have been heartily among those who argued that the violence required to establish and maintain a state in Palestine would mar the Jewish soul and condemn generations to fear and hatred. I would have been among those insisting that the future of the Jewish people was and ought to be in Europe. And thus I would probably have ended up among the millions Europe murdered.
And so I am left with Israel–a country I love and, at the same time, wish didn’t have to exist. I am always hoping to understand it better, both for myself and because I feel that being a responsible part of the American Jewish community demands constant, informed, moderating engagement with both those who refuse to recognize Israel’s necessity and those who refuse to acknowledge its tragedy.