InDepth

In Claude Lanzmann's monumental documentary, SHOAH, one of the surviving leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising remarks: "If you could lick my heart, it would poison you." Sadly, the time may still come - if Prime Minister Olmert is permitted to continue following Washington's cartography - that surviving Israelis will someday express similar sentiments.

The Olmert government's September 29 decision to define the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip as a "hostile entity" was greeted with quite a few raised eyebrows.

Throughout history there have been gentiles who decided the only way for them to come close to God was to convert to Judaism.

“And you shall rejoice in your festival” says the pasuk at the end of Parshas Re’ei (16:14), and this is actually a mitzvah. I suspect this is not intended to be one of the more difficult mitzvot for us to fulfill, yet for many hard-working Jews the Yomim Tovim are far greater sources of stress than joy.

In my former life as a school psychologist, I spent a great deal of time doing intelligence testing. Occasionally, I had the agonizing task of breaking the dreadful news to parents that a child was severely developmentally disabled. Whether or not I packaged the term in soft euphemisms like “cognitively depressed” or “mentally deficient,” most parents eventually caught on that I was just searching for other words to mollify that unbearable label.

Historians are both amazed and dumbfounded at the incredible saga of the Aztec nation. How was it possible, they ask, for Cortez and a relatively small number of Spanish soldiers to bring the mighty Aztec alliance to its knees?

Covering Israel, its relationship with the United States and the influential lobby that straddles the two often requires the basic skills and instincts of a cub reporter on the neighborhood beat.

In Yiddish folklore, the real-life Polish town of Chelm was characterized as a legendary community of fools. According to this folkloric tradition, Chelm’s residents were exceedingly proud of their tradition of non-wisdom and convoluted insight into the world’s problems. They viewed themselves as brilliant.

It’s been several months since the Monitor’s last listing of worthwhile websites and blogs, so here’s an updated version. Some of the sites that appeared on previous lists have been removed (either they went defunct, lapsed into relative inactivity, or simply failed to hold the Monitor’s interest) and a number of new ones have been added.

Can the current government of Israel protect its citizens? Clearly, Israelis have already experienced the Oslo and Road Map "peace process," as a Terror Process. If Judea/Samaria are soon transformed into "Palestine," the peace process will once again become a war and terror process.

Let me begin by wishing all of my readers a very happy and healthy new year. This past year was filled with many wonderful joys and several sorrows, but we thank Hashem for another year of life.

Before Rosh Hashanah - Yom Kippur, it is customary to pray at the graves of one's parents.

President Bush, writes Graydon Carter, paranoiac editor of Vanity Fair, the magazine that strives mightily to be taken seriously while championing celebrity narcissism and mindless titillation (“Nicole Kidman Bares All,” trills the cover of the current issue, thick as always with ads for perfume, lingerie and high-priced clothes and toys for high-income yuppies and those who aspire to be), “has taken away our civil liberties.”

The instant the Lelover Tzaddik reentered the bais hamedrash, the Chozeh of Lublin seized the moment to launch into a fervent recitation of Lamnatzayach.

Jewish tradition teaches that the city of Tzfat (Safed), located in the north of Israel in the beautiful Galilee region, is one of Israel’s four holy cities (the others are Jerusalem, Tiberias, and Hebron). Yet it is Tzfat that is praised for its exceptional spiritual presence.

Did you enjoy 5767? For Jews around the world, it was the usual assortment of bad – and even worse – news. Of course, not everything was awful. It was a year of recovery in Israel, as the aftermath of last year’s less than successful Second Lebanon War was followed by recriminations and political stalemate.

It wasn’t easy for me to come out with a public call to Israelis to oppose the evacuation of Jews from Hebron with passive, non-violent resistance. Hebron is Jerusalem, not Yamit.

The Passover Seder liturgy tells us that in every generation an enemy arises seeking to eradicate the Jewish people. In the last hundred years, those enemies included the Russian czar, Stalin, Hitler, Gamal Abdel Nasser and, more recently, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Well, we just marked the anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities and who pops out of his Caliphite Cave? Yup, Osama bin Laden.

Here we go again. The more things change, the more they remain the same. Now it is Hebron, where a number of soldiers have correctly refused intrinsically wrongful orders to evict fellow Jews from their homes. Now it is Homesh, where authentic Jews labor industriously and heroically to remedy earlier IDF evictions.