Words of the Week

“If I was to look at America through the unforgiving prism those loud, marginal If-Not-Nowers use for viewing Israel, I would call my American friends and yell: ‘What kind of a country do you live in? Is that all there is? The underclass and the overclass? How did America get so broken and break for so many people? Maybe “America really ain’t a good idea.”‘

Instead, I still believe in America, like I still believe in Israel. I believe both have serious problems, but also believe that both have serious resources, including tremendous creativity and goodwill, to solve them. And I’d rather be a Jewish and American Voice for Balance than a screechy crank whose extremism today guarantees irrelevance and just more anger tomorrow.”

Source: Gil Troy, “Love of Israel, America, Can Take on Many Forms” (The Jerusalem Post)

Words of the Week

“She had only been there that one summer after the war, and she said the streets were filled with a fantastic energy, and everyone was singing ‘Jerusalem of Gold,’ celebrating the fact that they could return to the Western Wall and explore the ancient alleyways of our forefathers and mothers…the places that the poets and the sages wept and dreamed over, the very place where our exile began 2000 years ago.”

Source: Sarah Tuttle-Singer, Jerusalem, Dream and Quartered: A Year Spent Living in the Christian, Muslim, Armenian, and Jewish Quarters of Old Jerusalem (cross-posted as the “Sunday Sentence” on the Practicing Writing blog)

Words of the Week

“The new state was sealed north, east, and south by hostile borders and washed on the west by the merciful Mediterranean—the sea into which its children dove as if into the arms of complete freedom and from which they learned the audacity they made their trademark, and into which Fanya never stepped after she saw a jellyfish floating in its waters.”

Source: Rachel Kadish, From a Sealed Room

(Cross-posted on Practicing Writing as a “Sunday Sentence”)

Words of the Week

“On Monday, [Mahmoud] Abbas met with the family of Ahed Tamimi, the 17 year old Palestinian girl arrested in December for slapping an Israeli soldier outside her home. Tamimi is currently in prison awaiting her trial later this month, and the video of her assaulting a soldier went viral and made her a worldwide celebrity. While Israelis celebrated the soldier’s restraint in trying his best to ignore Tamimi slapping and pushing him and not responding, Palestinians celebrated Tamimi as a hero courageous enough to stand up to an armed soldier with no hint of fear or concern about the consequences. There is a debate to be had about whether either of these perspectives is correct, but one thing that Tamimi’s actions are indisputably not is non-violent. Tamimi’s newfound fame is in fact a direct result of the fact that she did employ violence, and wasn’t scared off by a soldier much larger than her and carrying a rifle. One might want to call what she did brave or heroic, but nothing about it was peaceful.”

Source: Michael Koplow, “Violence and Non-Violence” (Ottomans and Zionists)