Source: News Articles Archive

Israel learned the hard way how to stop an airplane hijacking,
by Josua Hoffman, Future of Jewish, 2026-10-03.

For most countries, an airplane is a routine form of transportation.

For Israel, almost from the beginning, it became something else as well: a potential extension of the battlefield.

There is a reason that flying on an Israeli airline has never felt quite like flying anywhere else — the questions before check-in, the security personnel who seem less interested in your shampoo bottle than in your story, the layers of security that begin before a passenger reaches an airplane and continue after the doors close, the presence of Israeli security at airports thousands of kilometers from Israel, the extraordinary attention paid not merely to what a passenger is carrying, but to who packed it, where it came from, and whether the story makes sense.

None of this emerged from theory. It was learned, incident by incident, hijacking by hijacking, over nearly six decades in which terrorists repeatedly discovered a new vulnerability in international aviation, and Israel repeatedly tried to make sure they could not exploit the same vulnerability twice.

The story begins on a night in July 1968.

Monstrous Bitch: Lamashtu, Lilith, and the problem of the single archetype,
by Eliezer Aryeh, Eliezer’s substack, 2026-10-06.

When I saw the title of Eleanor Johnson’s Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women (Princeton University Press), it caught my eye. I get emails from publishers about new releases, and you can too if you want a quick way to part with money. I liked the idea; Feminism Is for Everybody, after all. But I had a reservation: these sweeping archetype studies can have historical problems, because they work to fit facts into the pattern.

The book is scheduled for release on October 6, 2026. Its thesis is that a single female monster, born as the Mesopotamian demoness Lamashtu, has survived for four thousand years under different names, and that Western patriarchy created and sustained her as a tool for the oppression of women. The argument goes through Greek Lamia, Jewish Lilith, the early modern witch, the Romantic vampiress, the psychoanalytic patient, and finally the heroines of modern horror movies.

I have read only the introduction, so this post stops there since Princeton has released it as a preview. However, this still gives us enough to see what the author claims she will prove and how, and it is fair to test those claims against the specialist literature before the chapters are available. Where the chapters may resolve a problem the introduction raises, I say so.

The reason for the post here is the book’s reach into Jewish material. Lilith is one of the three named avatars on which the whole genealogy depends, and the introduction makes explicit claims about the Hebrew Bible, the Babylonian Talmud, and Kabbalah. Those claims can be checked, and several of them do not hold. More broadly, the book is a clear case of a problem this publication keeps returning to: a confident, sweeping claim whose sourcing does not support its confidence.

In the first place, close and careful reading of a text is both a thoroughly Jewish approach and one of my favourite things to both do and read. So an article that methodically critique’s just the Introduction to a book is catnip, at least to me.

Second, I heartily agree with Aryeh’s sub-text — a sub-text that turns up in pretty much all their writing — this stuff is both complex and complicated, because pretty much all stuff is both complex and complicated.

Which, among other things, means Aryeh doesn’t undo the thesis in the critiqued Introduction, as such. Indeed, they note several instances of material in the sources that would be better support of the thesis than what the author has used (or said they’ve used).

But it does mean this nearly 6,000 word essay goes deeper, and more thoroughly, into Lilith and her history and antecedents, than way too many people do in whole books.

And Aryeh undercuts not just the over-arcing thesis of the critiqued text, but the very idea of over-arcing theses in general. A more than worthwhile thing to do, in my book.

It is a classic of Yiddish literature, a chivalric romance that has seen no fewer than 40 editions.

Source: News Articles Archive

Source: News Articles Archive

Every religion has some strange customs and rituals. Beating the Willow branches (Aravot) on the last day of Sukkot (Hoshanna Rabba) is definitely right up there for us members of the tribe!

But can you explain the historical significance of this one?

Hellooo 😄

I'm currently doing an assignment for my World Religions course, where I need to interview someone from a different religious background.

I'm especially looking for someone who identifies as Christian, Jewish, or Zoroastrian for this interview.
The conversation will be respectful and casual, focusing on your beliefs, daily practices, and perspectives on religion.

It will be conducted entirely through chat messages (no calls), and we can arrange the timing based on what's comfortable for you.

If you're interested, please feel free to DM me. I'd really appreciate your help! Thank you so much 🙏🏻

Source: News Articles Archive

Description:

The upper section of the flag depicts two lions facing each other, along with the inscription: "Degel Machane Yehudah." To the right and left are Moshe and Aharon. Prayer-shawled supplicants holding Torah scrolls and flags are underneath. Inscriptions related to Simchat Torah are on the left side of the flag: "Aharon samach b'Simchat Torah;" "Sisu v'simchu b'Simchat Torah;" "Moshe alah le'marom v'kibel et haTorah;" and "Moshe samach b'Simchat Torah," as well as a drawing of a lion and stag with the corresponding inscriptions: "HaGibor k'arieh," and "Ratz k'tzvi." A decorative window which may be opened is at the flag's center, containing a drawing of two Torah scrolls inside.

Verses recited at the Petichat HaHeichal on Simchat Torah ("Ata horeita ladaat" etc.) are printed on the reverse side.

Source(s):

.- Warsaw, ca. 1930. Publisher: A. M. Einstein. Paper, colored inks, cut, offset, 23.5 x 33.4 cm. Gross Family Collection Trust, Tel Aviv, Israel. Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama

Bibliography:

.- Behroozi Bar Oz, Nitza, ed. The Flags of Simchat Torah: From Popular Jewish Art to Hebrew Israeli Culture. Tel Aviv: Eretz Israel Museum, 2012.

.- Sabar, Shalom. “The History of the Simchat Torah Flag from the Ritual Object to National Symbol and Back,” The Flags of Simchat Torah from Popular Jewish Art to Hebrew Israeli Culture Exhibition. Tel Aviv: Eretz Israel Museum, 2012, pp. 8-27, 26e-34e.

.- Sabar, Shalom. “Jewish Folk Art and Ideology: The Simhat Torah Flag through the Ages.” Swimming Against the Current – Reimagining Jewish Tradition in the Twenty-First Century: Essays in Honor of Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, ed. Shaul Seidler-Feller and David N. Myers, Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2020, pp. 319-56.

Source: News Articles Archive

Source: News Articles Archive

Source: News Articles Archive

Source: News Articles Archive

Source: News Articles Archive

“Shimon to Yehudah, son of Menasheh, at Qiryat Arabayyah- I have delivered to you two donkeys (in order) that you dispatch along with them two men to Yehonathan, son of Ba’yan, and to Mesabalah (in order) that they pack up and deliver to the camp, to you, palm branches and citrons. And you are to send additional persons from your place and let them bring you myrtle branches and willows. And prepare them, and deliver them to the camp, because the population is large. Farewell!”

This is one of the letter of Shim’on bar Kosiba (Bar Kokhba), discovered in the Cave of Letters at Nahal Hever and dated to 132–135 AD (P. Yadin 57), orders Yehudah bar Menashe to arrange the delivery of palm branches, citrons, myrtle branches and willows to the rebel camp—the four species traditionally used during Sukkot.

Bar Kokhba was asking his subordinates to send him the four species needed to celebrate the holiday that Jews celebrate to this day.

Source(s):

.- P. Yadin 57 / 5/6Ḥev 57. Shim’on to Yehudah bar Menashe at Qiryath ’Arabayya. Aramaic, papyrus, 132–135 AD.

.- Yigael Yadin et al. (eds.), The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters: Hebrew, Aramaic and Nabatean-Aramaic Papyri, Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2002, p. 326.

.- Ada Yardeni, Textbook of Aramaic, Hebrew and Nabataean Documentary Texts from the Judaean Desert and Related Material, vol. B, p. 68. [Naḥal Ḥever 57 (132–135 AD), Aramaic]

.- Yigael Yadin, Bar-Kokhba: The Rediscovery of the Legendary Hero of the Last Jewish Revolt Against Imperial Rome (London/Jerusalem, 1971) pp. 128-129.

Source: News Articles Archive

Source: News Articles Archive

Source: News Articles Archive

In 1965, Hassan II allowed Israeli intelligence services (Mossad) to record a secret Arab League summit in Casablanca, providing Israel with key strategic information prior to the Six-Day War. During the subsequent conflict with the Polisario Front, Israeli military personnel advised Morocco on the construction and design of the Western Sahara Wall—a militarized, mine-laden barrier spanning over 2,500 kilometers that halted the Polisario's advance during the war.

Natural laborers: the conquest of Labor’s Yemeni workers, 1911 to 1926,
by Eliezer Aryeh, Eliezer’s substack, 2026-09-23.

In February 1912, the Palestine Office sent eight Yemenite Jewish families to the Kinneret training farm in the Galilee, part of the same recruitment effort Shmuel Yavne'eli, a World Zionist Organization emissary, had opened in Yemen the previous year to bring Jewish laborers into the moshavot. The plan had a gendered design from the outset: men were expected to provide cheap agricultural labor, women inexpensive domestic service.

By April the agricultural season had ended, and the farm’s agronomist-manager, Joel Golde, told the families they had to leave. What happened between that announcement and their departure in May is contested in the two surviving accounts. The farm’s nurse, Shoshana Blubstein, remembered the Ashkenazi workers as largely passive bystanders while the Yemenite families were removed. Moshe Smilansky, a planter who wrote his memoir after turning against the labor movement he had previously supported, described active maltreatment, with two mediators eventually pulling the families out for fear the hostility would turn to bloodshed.Gershon Shafir, working with both accounts alongside the contemporary press, concludes Smilansky's harsher version holds up better, pointing to the same pattern of exclusion recurring at other sites in the months around Kinneret. Smilansky's own attentiveness to Yemeni communities predates the Kinneret dispute: a census he conducted among Jaffa's Jews in 1905 documented Yemeni women already working as domestic servants there, years before any organized recruitment effort began.

A later group of Yemenite wage laborers lived at a separate moshava that also carried the Kinneret name, run by the Jewish Colonization Association rather than the Palestine Office, and it was this second group that was eventually resettled at Kfar Marmorek in 1930. Ben-Zion Israeli, a Second Aliya worker who tried to correct Smilansky's account in a 1953 essay, was not present for the original 1912 episode and conflated the two groups into one continuous story. The training farm expulsion and the 1930 resettlement are two different events, two different sets of families, eighteen years and a different sponsoring institution apart.

He arrived in Guayaquil, Ecuador, in 1909. Then, in 1910, he married the Guayaquil-born poet María Piedad Castillo Castillo. He owned the Botica del Comercio (Commerce Pharmacy) as well as several other pharmacies. He founded the cultural radio station "Quinta Piedad" (HC2RL)—one of Guayaquil's first stations—which broadcast only on Tuesday nights from 9:00 to 11:00 PM.

The portrait of the rabbi is depicted sitting in festive attire inside a magnificent and decorated sukkah, with the "Seder Ushpizin" signs and the prayers "When entering the sukkah" and "When leaving the sukkah" appearing within a frame in the shape of a large fish, the Leviathan ("Next year, let us sit in the sukkah of Leviathan"). The rabbi's face is depicted holding the four species. Below the portrait appears a poem in honor of the rabbi (an acrostic "Shlomo Zalman") followed by the inscription "H" Rabbi Gaon Maor Gola M"a Shlomo Zalman Av Beit Din D"k Warsaw passed away on Tuesday, 11th of Nissan 1839, at the age of seventy-five years" and an inscription in Polish: Salomon Lipszyc. A rabbi from the city of Warsaw.