Grandma's army

                                          Ephraim Kishon (1924-2005), deserves a blog of his own. He was Israel’s premier satirist, whose biting wit shaped the national agenda of the formative years of the Jewish state, and kept people laughing at the same time. Mr. Kishon’s influence went beyond the large number of people who read his books and newspaper column or watched the skits, plays and movies he wrote. He was one of the most popular satirists worldwide, selling more than 40 million books in his half-century of writing.  Efraim Kishon’s quotes: Israel is a country so tiny that there is no room to write its name on the world map. It is a country of boundless boundaries. It is a country where mothers learn the mother tongue from their sons. It is a country wh...

JEW BASHERS Einstein on this very subject: "If my theory of relativity is proven correct, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew". The Jews are the only people in the world who have found hostility in every country in which they settled in any numbers. Throughout history people have accused the Jews of the most outrageous, unbelievable things – from causing the plague and other scourges, to present day Holocaust deniers.   In spite of the fact that the Holocaust was the best documented account of genocide in the world ever written. Deborah Lipstadt a history professor was asked to write a book on Holocaust deniers. She maintains that for deniers to be right all “others” have to be wrong . The “others” are the victims, the survivors; bystanders, such as the   Poles who lived around the death camps and wat...

My purpose in writing these blogs is in response to negative, orchestrated, and biased media propaganda against Israel. I am not interested in politics per se and am not trying to promote any particular political party. I simply insist that our Jewish voices be heard. It is an uphill job trying to combat the disturbingly slanted press and TV coverage of the horrors happening inside Israel, together with acts of anti-Semitism which have surfaced worldwide – often hidden from the public or trivialized. The Jews have a long overdue reckoning with the world. We hoped that with a country of our own we will have a world in which the Jews do not live subject to the whims of their host countries. No more 1290, when England decided to evict all its Jews. Or Spain, in 1492, when the Jews were given the choice to leave, convert or burn at the stake. No more 1930’s, when Germany turned from a land of seemingly endless possibilities for the Jews, to the beginning of a satanic plan to eradicate ...

For a country that has to spend such a huge, disproportionate   slice of the national   budget    on defense needs in order to exist, Israel can still be considered as the People of the Book. A fledgling state which resolved to make the most of the only resource it had – human intellectual capital – with results far exceeding what anyone could have imagined. Abba Eban once wrote that the Jews gave humanity the notion of “civilization. “ For 3,000 years, the creative tension between the People and the Book generated philosophy and law, offered models of piety and morality and defined a discipline leading to personal commitment and communal compassion.” In the words of Ben Gurion : "In Eretz Israel [the Land of Israel] arose the Jewish people, in which was formed its spiritual, religious and national image, in which it created national and universal cultural treasures and bequeathed to the world entire the eternal Book of Books…" Ben Gurion also wrote: “Anyon...