Grandma's army

As proud of most Jews are of being Jewish – they find it hard to understand how someone seemingly “normal” would be foolish enough to convert to Judaism.  One outstanding example of a convert (by default) is Dr. Micah Goodman. His mother came from a wealthy Catholic family from Oklahoma, and converted to Judaism in an Orthodox ceremony. She married a secular Jew and made Aliya with her husband, in 1969.  Dr. Goodman is a very successful researcher and lecturer on Jewish philosopher, and has written several books on the subject, apart from heading an Academy of Jewish Thought. His latest book, Moses Final Speech, made its way to the top of the bestseller list very quickly. He has dedicated a few years of his life to Moses because the last of the five books of the Pentateuch (Torah) Deuteronomy , is the first book in the Torah that doesn’t profess to be of divine creation, but is a repository of Moses’s insights and thoughts. In his speech, Moses is trying to warn t...

Israel is a country in the Middle East, a piece of real estate so small that one needs a magnifying glass when searching for it on a map. Its main inhabitants, the Jews, together with their brothers and sisters throughout the world , amount to a pathetic less than 0.02 percent   of the world population. As Sir Isaiah Berlin once famously quipped, “The Jews have enjoyed rather too much history and too little geography.” The anti-Semite has a hard time with Jews. They boycott us in academia, journalism, European governments, the marketplace, etc. The trouble with us is that we are constantly breaking the rules. For thousands of years, we have survived powerful empires that did everything to destroy us – the Egyptians, the Romans, the Greeks, the Germans - and there were plenty to give them a willing hand. In the 20 th century, it looked as if they had finally succeeded. Six million were murdered in the Holocaust. But, instead of disappearing, we decided that after 2,000 yea...

JER USA LEM RECOGNISED The exact three middle letters of Jerusalem are USA Jerusalem has been the capital of only one nation in the history of the world – Israel. Until 1948,when the Jordanians conquered the eastern half of the city, Jerusalem was a unified city, its occupation by Jordan not recognized by the world at large.  Its only period of division was 1949-1967.  1,000 years before Christ, King David conquered Jerusalem and made it the national capital of the Jewish people. This was the first Jewish state. After periods of exile and return, Jerusalem became the capital of the people a second time a few centuries before Christ.  This was the Hasmonean Kingdom, the second Jewish state. The Romans then conquered the Hasmoneans. From the end of the Roman Empire until the 20 th century, Jerusalem changed hands many times. There is, of course, no mention of Jerusalem in the 33 paras. of the Koran, which talks about other holy places. Christians and M...