Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: book review

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Wednesday, January 13, 2021

Book Review: Galilee Gold by Susie Aziz Pam (Judean Rose)

Galilee Gold is the kind of book you can’t put down. I started reading the book on a Friday night after supper, read late into the night, picked up where I’d left off the next morning, and had read the entire book—cover to cover—by 11 AM, just in time to sit down for Sabbath lunch. Not bad for this first effort—a novel that is part historical fiction, part romance—from author Susie Aziz Pam.

The story outlined in Galilee Gold takes place in the 18^th century and is based on the life of Daher el-Omar, a powerful figure of the time. El-Omar was a self-proclaimed Bedouin king who encouraged Jewish settlement in the Galilee. In Pam’s skillful hands, el-Omar’s tolerance for the Jews leads to romance when el Omar falls hard for the niece of a Syrian Jewish family under his protection.

The Jewish heroine of the book, Tamar, is of course, beautiful, with a fiery nature and golden hair. It’s no wonder that el-Omar is smitten, though I admit I was discomfited by the concept of a Bedouin-Jewish romance—especially since this is fiction: it never actually happened.

That being the case, why imagine a romance between a Jewish woman and a Bedouin king? Because it makes for darned good reading, even if I didn’t like the concept in theory. And make no mistake: I devoured this book and hope that Galilee Gold is only the first of many books to come from the pen of Susie Aziz Pam.

I spoke to Susie Pam to learn more:

Varda Epstein: Can you tell us a bit about your upbringing, your family, and how and when you came to make Aliyah?

Susie Aziz Pam

Susie Pam: My family were kind of nomads. Both my parents were Persian Jews, from the Mesh'adi community. Mesh'adi Jews were known for keeping the mitzvoth inside their homes, while practicing Islam on the outside—but that is the subject of my next book.

My father's family lived in the Bukharan Quarter in Jerusalem, where their house stands to this day. My mother's family lived in London. After seeking their fortune in London, New York, South Africa, and New York again, my parents settled in Kew Gardens, Queens. We are a very Zionistic family and all of my father's family remained in Israel. So a few years after the Six Day War, in the wave of pro-Israel sentiment, my parents moved to Jerusalem, giving me just enough time to finish high school in New York.

1925 photo of the ancestral Aziz home in the Bukharan Quarter of Jerusalem

Varda Epstein: Can you talk about how you came to write this story? How did you come to hear about Daher el-Omar? Why did this story beckon to you?

Susie Pam: We first met Daher el-Omar when we visited the Yehiam Fortress. The little I found out about el-Omar then, made him stand out like a Disney character: he traded with pirates, he fought off the Ottomans, and he crowned himself the King of the Galilee. But after I began to read up on him, I discovered an amazing fact—el-Omar invited the Jewish communities from Turkey and Syria to settle in the Holy Land. "Return and inherit the land of your forefathers!"

Yehiam Fortress

Inside Yehiam Fortress

Varda Epstein: Who was el-Omar? What was he like?

Susie Pam: Daher el-Omar was the son of the local tax-collector in the Galilee. His vision of Moslems, Christians, and Jews living together and prospering in the eighteenth century, made him a very tolerant and pluralistic leader.

Varda Epstein: Is there any evidence that el-Omar had a romance with a Jewish woman or took a Jewish wife?

Susie Pam: Not to my knowledge. He had many wives and many sons. I only deal with two of his wives in my novel. At the very end of his life, when he was in his 80's, he had a young wife from Russia, who was blond and blue eyed. Legend has it, that the Ottomans attacked Acco (Acre) and he went back to save this wife, and he was killed. But I do not cover that part of his life in my book.

Susie with her two daughters, this past summer. The author also has two sons.

Varda Epstein: How long did it take you to write Galilee Gold, your first novel?

Susie Pam: Well, when I first started I had brown hair and now it’s gray! It took me a good many years—mainly because I wrote most of the chapters in my writing group in Jerusalem, and we only met once a week! Also, when I started writing, there was not a lot of available information about that period—now there is a lot more.

The whole Pam family (see what I did there?)

Varda Epstein: Can you tell us about some of the research involved in writing this work of historical fiction?

Susie Pam: Let's just say that over the last few years, I sent a lot of $5 donations to Wikipedia. My husband is a tour guide and he had a few books in which el-Omar is mentioned. I wrote about herbalism during that period, so I had to read up on plants and their uses, and which were available in the Middle East. My daughter studied herbalism, so I was also able to ask her questions. When I reached a point where I had a lot of questions, we went back up to the Galilee and I found a tour guide whose specialty is Daher el-Omar.

We arranged to meet Sharif Sharif, a heritage and conservation expert of Nazareth. He introduced us to Ziad Daher Zaydany—an architect and artist who drew a portrait of el-Omar and is one of his many descendants. Of course, I imagined him a little more handsome and dashing in his younger days than he appears in the portrait.

Daher el-Omar portrait painted by Ziad Zaydany in 1990

Varda Epstein: Without giving away too much in the way of spoilers, your fictional Jewish heroine Tamar, is depicted as el-Omar’s captive. Do you think it likely that if the story had been true, the Jewish community would have made an effort to ransom and reclaim her? How important is the concept of ransoming a captive in Jewish law?

Susie Pam: Traditionally, ransoming a captive is a very important concept, even today—and I believe the Jews of Aleppo would have made an effort to raise the funds needed to rescue Tamar, had it been feasible.

Varda Epstein: What’s next up for Susie Pam?

Susie Pam: I have another three books in the works—at different stages of completion. Two are historical fiction, and one is a story about an American girl who volunteers on a kibbutz—a traditional kibbutz from the old days—and decides to stay.

***

Galilee Gold is currently available at Booklocker and Amazon.

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Book Review: Not in Kansas Anymore: Academic Freedom in Palestinian Universities

Not in Kansas Anymore: Academic Freedom in Palestinian Universities, by Cary Nelson, is a book-length research paper that exposes the true threats to academic freedom in Palestinian territories.

Unlike what BDS activists claim, the problem is not Israel.

For this book, Nelson has expanded one chapter of his masterful Israel Denial book into this comprehensive treatment of the subject of how Palestinian students have no academic freedom at all, at least when it comes to political speech about Israel and Palestinian leaders.

He describes how the (very) few Palestinian scholars who are moderate in wanting dialogue with Israel have been threatened and nearly killed, noting that pro-Hamas academics are also threatened in the West Bank.

Palestinians like to claim that the annual elections of student bodies at their universities are proxies for regular elections that haven’t been held for 17 years and show how important democratic processes are to them. In fact, these elections are accompanied with intimidation, threats, violence and even armed interference by the Palestinian Authority (and, by proxy, Hamas) to push their own student groups to lead the campus.

Palestinian academia is a fun-house mirror of American liberal campuses. If a professor says something that makes students uncomfortable, he or she can be threatened by students much more directly and physically than today’s cancel culture.

In Gaza, the idea of academic freedom is a sad joke. All students at Islamic University of Gaza must take one full year of Islamist indoctrination courses.

One amazing section of the book shows an IUG literature class dissecting a humorous children’s poem by British poet Roger McGough called The Cat’s Protection League about a feline protection racket. The students are prompted and encouraged to interpret the poem in the most outrageous antisemitic ways, such as assuming that the cats represent Jewish gangsters. Antisemitism pervades academia in Gaza, and no one can oppose that without facing real world consequences.

That is only the tip of the iceberg. West Bank universities compete as to which of them have had students kill the most Jews. Universities are the ideological homes of terrorism, and often the physical homes as well –weapons labs have been built in Gaza universities and one of them held kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit for a time. Many terrorists during the second intifada came from West Bank universities, including Ahlam Tamimi who helped bomb the Sbarro pizza shop.

The universities also often praise terrorism. The most infamous case was the exhibit, complete with bloody body parts, of the same Sbarro attack at An Najah University: The same university more recently displayed mock-ups of a man stabbing a religious Jew and a bloody model of a car running over Jews.

Nelson does point out times that Israel interfered with campus curricula, but that all ended at the end of the first intifada. Palestinian government control and intimidation continues on campus today, to the point that students and professors are self-censoring to stay out of trouble. (He does talk about Israel’s relatively rare raids on campus since then, which are understandable when there is an imminent terror threat but often could be more effective by detaining students at home.)

Nelson also shows how other claims by BDS, that Israel blocks students from going abroad or foreign instructors to come to teach, are exaggerated – Israel does not have any more strict restrictions on those movements than most Western democracies.

Small details in the book are illuminating. For example, Nelson points out that while Israel is roundly castigated for administrative detention, the Palestinian Authority detains hundreds of people without charge as well, although they are not as forthcoming with the statistics as Israel is. (I follow Palestinian media closely and have never seen any mention of this.)

Another section has a footnote that mentions that Norman Finkelstein actually defended Hamas’ policy of murdering “collaborators” with Israel.

This is the sort of hypocrisy exposed in Not in Kansas Anymore. The boycotters’ pretense of caring about Palestinian academic freedom is clearly just an excuse to attack Israel as they ignore the far worse crimes that Palestinian students and professors are subject to every day from their own leaders and peers.

Kalman Samuels on Shalva, Yossi, and “Dreams never Dreamed” (Judean Rose)

"Dreams never Dreamed" offers an inside look at how a child’s devastating injury from a tainted vaccine, led to the founding of Shalva, the Israel Association for the Care and Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities and home of the famous Shalva Band. As author Kalman Samuels, founder and CEO of Shalva would have it, Shalva’s accomplishments are all due to his wife Malki’s vision. Malki Samuels has a keen sense of what needs to be done, and how it should be accomplished.

Like many young people of the 70s, Kalman, a Canadian national, grew up in a secular Jewish home, and ended up religiously observant in Israel. It’s always interesting to read how people get from point A to point B in their personal journeys, but that’s not the reason to buy this book. You want to read “Dreams never Dreamed” to learn how people turn tragedy into hope and hope into tremendous accomplishments, as Kalman and Malki Samuels have done. You want to know how people keep dreaming dreams and beyond when life throws a curve ball. How you get up the next day and make things happen.

There are other reasons to read “Dreams never Dreamed.” You’ll want to know more about Yossi Samuels, his life today, and how the Shalva Band made a splash on the national stage. I spoke to Kalman (full disclosure, we have a family connection) to find out more about the book and his story:

Varda Epstein: Tell us about the name of your book: “Dreams never Dreamed.” What are some of the dreams you never dreamed that came about? To what do you attribute these successes?

Kalman Samuels: The name of my book reflects the nature of the miraculous series of events that led to my son Yossi's breakthrough and the establishment of the Shalva organization, which serves thousands of children with disabilities and their families. These were not my childhood dreams or particular goals that I set out to achieve from a young age. They are dreams that I could have never imagined, and as such they are dreams which I never dreamed.

One of the dreams that I never dreamed would come about is Yossi's remarkable breakthrough to communication. It changed all of our lives forever. Yossi became blind and deaf during infancy, and after eight long years of silence and darkness, he learned to spell sign language in the palm of his hand. Yossi was able to communicate with us and learn about the world. Everyone in the family learned how to speak sign language and we helped Yossi learn new words. He was like a sponge and he soaked up the whole world around him instantly. We could have never imagined this miraculous turnaround.

You can't hold a good man down. Yossi Samuels, at work.

Varda Epstein: Can you tell us a bit about your family roots? Your wife’s?

Kalman Samuels: I was born in Vancouver, Canada to a very loving and supportive family. Although not religiously practicing Jews, my parents were very proud of their Jewish roots and celebrated Jewish holidays. My siblings and I grew up with all of the luxuries of a middle-class, North American lifestyle.

Malki's family came from Europe and survived the Holocaust. Malki grew up with a pure faith in G-d and was raised in an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle, went to good schools, and enjoyed belonging to a growing community.

Kalman Samuels' high school graduation photo, back when he was "Kerry."

Varda Epstein: Your book is very interesting in that it’s a first person account, but your wife is a central figure in your story. You take her guidance, and somehow it always works out, better than you had expected. Malki seems to be equal parts intuition and wisdom. How does she know what she knows? How did you come to trust her? Can you give us an example of a counterintuitive directive from Malki that followed this successful formula?

Kalman Samuels: Malki always had a very profound understanding of the human spirit. Whether it was something related to Yossi, our family's general wellbeing, or Shalva's growth, I always trusted Malki every step of the way—and I still always do.

Malki insisted on Yossi wearing glasses, even though he was confirmed blind. She explained that they were the one thing he didn't take apart and that he insisted on having his glasses with him at all times. It must mean that the glasses are helpful to him in some way—and they were.

Also when it came to things beyond Malki's motherly instincts—like navigating my job in computer programming, or the architecture of the Shalva center—Malki's direction was always spot on. Successful counterintuitive directives from Malki is definitely a theme of our story and the inspiration behind how our lives and Shalva have progressed and developed over the years.

A young Yossi Samuels, learning about the world.

Varda Epstein: Yossi was the victim of a tainted vaccination. How do you see him today? How do you see the issue of vaccination? What about the Israeli legal system? Is it possible to get justice?

Kalman Samuels: Yossi is not the victim of a vaccination; rather, he is a victim of medical malpractice in that they knew they had a tainted batch of vaccine and continued using it for six months injuring hundreds including Yossi. Unfortunately, there are many people around the world who are victims of this sort and I believe that many can relate to the helplessness that may transpire as a result of lacking transparency within large, bureaucratic systems.

Yossi Samuels was a beautiful healthy baby. Until he received a tainted vaccine.

Varda Epstein: How many families have you helped as a result of the organization you and Malki founded, Shalva?

Kalman Samuels: Every day, about 1,000 individuals with disabilities walk throughout our doors, and when including our additional programs that take place on a weekly or period-specific basis there are over 2,000. Their families also participate in support groups, events, and programs; and as such, our Shalva family is very large. Going back thirty years, I know that tens of thousands of families have been helped by the Shalva organization.

Kalman Samuels with son Yossi Samuels

Varda Epstein: Can you give us an overview of Shalva’s services and programs?

Kalman Samuels: Shalva provides a range of services to guide children with disabilities and their families throughout the lifecycle, from infancy through to adulthood. From a mere few weeks post birth, Shalva has personal early intervention therapy sessions for infants and their parents. We also have a day care and preschool for toddlers and an after school program for children in grade school. They come to Shalva for an afternoon full of activities- swimming, music, art, baking, and more. We also have a respite program that allows children to sleep over at Shalva once a week. We have summer camps and sports teams for our children as well. In recent years, Shalva branched out into adult services as well. Today we also provide programs for vocational training, employment, military service, and independent living in the community.

Rabbi Kalman Samuels, today.

Varda Epstein: The thing about Shalva is that it’s stunning. Why is this important?

Kalman Samuels: Many people who come to Shalva are taken by the colorful and welcoming interior design. Coupled with high standards of cleanliness, these physical elements of the building embody Shalva's emphasis on human dignity. Our children and parents feel welcome here and enjoy spending time here with their families and friends. It sends a message that people with disabilities are no less deserving of respect and high standards of quality than anyone else in society.

The Shalva Center is stunning, and situated in the heart of Jerusalem.

Varda Epstein: Everyone is in love with the Shalva band. How did they end up getting the gig to play for the president?

Kalman Samuels: The Shalva Band was invited to perform at the IAC Summit in 2019 and were notified just minutes before the performance that they would be introduced to the stage by United States President Trump. They performed a very moving rendition of "God Bless America" which was concluded by a surprising group hug with the President. Their performance made the front page of the newspapers in Israel and was tweeted by both President Trump and the White House. It was a very special moment for the band and the President.

Varda Epstein: What skills does it take to open a nonprofit like Shalva? Would you have jumped in if you had realized the extent of the undertaking?

Kalman Samuels: It takes a great deal of organizational, management, and fundraising skills to run an organization on Shalva's scale. We have thousands of beneficiaries, hundreds of employees and volunteers, and a 220,000 sq. meter building that runs around the clock. What I jumped into in 1990 was far from this. We had six children in a local garden apartment—and even then, we were overwhelmed. We could have never imagined that Shalva would become the organization that it is today and we feel blessed to be able to facilitate all of our programs to help so many children and families.

The very famous Shalva Band, which bears witness to the fact that dreams can be realized, even with disabilities.

Varda Epstein: Can you give us an update on Yossi’s life, today?

Kalman Samuels: Today Yossi is just as full of dreams and aspirations as ever. His daily routine is comprised of gainful employment at Israel’s Highway Six, which he finds personally meaningful. In recent years, Yossi has also channeled his keen sense of smell and taste to become certified as a sommelier and to produce two of his own wines. Outside of work, Yossi enjoys exercising and riding horses and his life is rich with family and friends.

Yossi Samuels meets President Bush in 2006.

"Dreams never Dreamed" is currently available on Amazon, Kindle, and the Koren website (https://korenpub.co.il/products/dreams-never-dreamed).

***

· Read more Judean Rose interviews:

· Arnold Roth: Ahlam Tamimi is Not in Hiding. Why is She Free?

· Shai Glick and Btsalmo: Unmasking the Disguise and Fighting for the Real Human Rights

· Betina Thorball to BDS: Herbalists Have a Right to Professional Neutrality

· David Collier’s Report on Amnesty International Reveals Its Toxicity and Hate

· Richard Landes: The Man Who Gave Pallywood a Name

· Genie Milgrom: “I Could Just Feel my Grandmothers Through the Papers”

· Phyllis Chesler: The Radical Feminist Who Refuses Your Intersectional Anti-Israel Slot

· Otzma Yehudit’s Dr Adva Biton: Finding Strength to Fight for Others

· Ryan Bellerose: Indigenous Has Nothing to Do with Time and Everything to Do with Connection

· Akiva Fuld: “I’m Doing This For Me”

· A Father Speaks Out: The Murder of Malki Roth and the Refusal of Jordan to Extradite the Beast Ahlam Tamimi (Arnold Roth)

· Israel's Jewish Indigenous Land Rights: A Conversation with Nan Greer, Part 1

· Israel's Jewish Indigenous Land Rights: A Conversation with Nan Greer, Part 2

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Book Review: Rise and Kill First, by Ronen Bergman

Ronen Bergman's Rise and Kill First is an astonishing work of research. Through over a thousand interviews, Bergman managed to write a history of Israel's policy of targeted assassinations that bypassed the famous secretiveness of Israel's spy agencies as well as the Israeli censor. (The book itself is proof that the Israeli military censor is very reluctant to actually censor things.)

The nearly 700 page book is not merely a history of targeted killings by Israel but really a history of Israel's legendary spy agencies, the Mossad, Aman and Shin Bet. While the story concentrates on assassinations, and is as complete on that topic as one can imagine, nothing happens in a vacuum - killings are done for a reason, whether it is to discourage future terrorism or to send a message to past terrorists that they will never be safe. (The hunt for the Munich terrorists is an example.)

The agencies' growing pains are documented as Israel learns how to do spycraft. From the early pre-state days through the covert (and sometimes overt) war against the terrorists who intruded into Israel in the 1950s, Israel's spy agencies grew in capabilities. They had to pivot to new methods and tools as the enemies and tactics changed.

The action never stops. Bergman writes that his original manuscript was twice as long; he managed to shorten each episode to a couple of pages without the stories losing their punch.

This drama is not only in the successes but also the failures - and there were a lot of failures, with the inevitable political fallout from the government. The Mossad and Shin Bet are not infallible by a long shot, and there have been botched operations, as well as seemingly unnecessary assassinations.

Especially striking at this time of a worldwide pandemic is that decisions are often made with incomplete information. Acting based on assumptions backed by facts is necessary and moral. The alternative, of doing nothing, can endanger more lives than the action can. Sometimes, the assassinations can help avoid war. These are difficult moral arguments and Bergman objectively looks at both sides.

Some of the mistakes were extraordinarily embarrassing. The botched attempt on Hamas leader Khaled Meshal's life was a major setback. The assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai was successful but was a diplomatic disaster as the agents used international passports. Yet when mistakes were made, the security services improved their methods and procedures to ensure that every mistake is made exactly once.

Bergman's reporting goes well into the 21st century, with details on the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists. He also details the assassinations of Hezbollah mastermind Imad Mugniyeh and of Syrian general Muhammad Suleiman in 2008, both of whom worked closely with Iran and the with the more recently departed Qassam Soleimani.

My only quibble is that Bergman sometimes allows his personal opinions to override the facts. He blames the second intifada on Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount even as he knows the evidence that it was pre-planned and Sharon's visit was only an excuse. His antipathy towards Netanyahu also allows one-sided reporting, with the other side of the story buried in footnotes.

But those are minor problems. Rise and Kill First was praised by both pro- and anti-Israel critics because he does such a good job of showing the ambiguity of the policies and of working in the shadows, breaking the normal rules of war, to help save lives.

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Book review: The Jonathan Sacks Haggada Collected Essays

This year, in response to the pandemic, Koren Publishers offered a free download of their Haggadah with the commentary of the former Chief Rabbi of Britain, Lord Jonathan Sacks.

But they didn't offer the other half of the book, the one that opens from the left-to-right side. I didn't even realize that this haggada had such an extensive set of essays - nearly 190 pages, which is pretty much book-length itself.

I love Sacks' writings and his weekly divrei Torah. He has an astonishing ability to notice things that others have not. His essays on Passover truly shine.

Sack's fluency with a wide range of sources, whether they be ancient or modern, history or poetry, sacred or ordinary, allows him to come up with startling conclusions that strike you with the dual realizations that no one ever seems to have made these points before, and that they seem to be correct. Here is an enthusiastic celebration of the Torah and specifically the Exodus as not only a story but as a work of philosophy, history and morality that pre-dates all others, and that was far ahead of its time and that had unparalleled influence in modern Western civilization.

Just one stunning example. Up until after World War II, the concept that one is obligated to adhere to higher standards, and to disobey if necessary, ones own leaders was hardly considered mainstream. Only after the Holocaust was the defense of "just following orders" no longer considered valid. Everyone is expected to disobey commands, even at the risk of one's life, that violate the higher values of human rights - but that is a relatively new concept.

Or is it? More than three thousand years ago, two women named Shifra and Puah - who according to the literal text seem to have been Egyptian, not Jewish - refused to obey Pharaoh's direct orders to murder all Jewish males upon birth. To them, there was a moral imperative that outweighed the demands of a deity-king.

This was, Rabbi Sacks notes, the first known example of civil disobedience, and one that was thousands of years ahead of modern times and completely alien to all peoples before (Sacks argues that the example in the Greek tragedy of Antigone is in fact not based on a higher moral code but on family loyalty.)

That insight alone would be enough to make a book notable, but these essays are filled with them. Sacks' essay on antisemitism is as good a treatment of the topic as any and better than most. He shows how the Exodus story influenced the founding fathers of the US to build a completely new type of nation, based on a Biblical-style covenant and concepts of inalienable rights that were most definitely not self-evident in 1776, but that were first written in the Torah.

Other essays and insights are equally dazzling, from noticing that the first speech Moses gives to the people on the cusp of freedom is an exhortation to teach their children, to brilliantly pinpointing the exact timeframe of the rabbis' seder in Bnei Brak and the importance of the anecdote to Jewish history.

You do not have to wait until next Pesach to enjoy the insights from Rabbi Sacks.

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Book review: The Lost Book of Moses, by Chanan Tigay

A previously unknown Biblical scroll, found by Arabs in clay jars in the desert, that is many centuries older than any known original Biblical text, and with some significant variations on the text itself from what we know.

It sounds like the Dead Sea Scrolls. But this find pre-dates the Scrolls by some seventy years.

A Jewish convert to Christianity who dealt with rare books and archaeological objects in the 1870s, Moses Wilhem Shapira, made that fantastic claim and was a celebrity in London for a few weeks while his find was scrutinized by an expert hired by the British Museum. Eventually he declared the scroll to be a fraud. Demoralized, depressed and disgraced, Shapira committed suicide not long after.

But after the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered and authenticated, with a remarkably similar backstory, people have wondered - could the Deuteronomy scroll claimed by Shapira have really been legitimate? Could the experts at the time have been wrong? Now we have much better scientific methods of determining the age of old objects - could this case be re-opened?

Chanan Tigay, a journalist and creative writing instructor, became obsessed with finding the answers to these questions. The presumably fraudulent scrolls had disappeared and presumed lost in a fire, but Tigay uncovered more and more information that showed that perhaps the standard story was not really true. Could there be another ancient Biblical scroll whose value would be unfathomable sitting in some dusty library or museum? Also, every expert consulted agreed that even if it was a fraud, it was a very clever one. Who would have even considered creating an alternate version of Deuteronomy at a time that no one was aware of any variants on the Torah save for the Samaritan version?

This is a very entertaining book, part a biography of Shapira that Tigay painstakingly researched (much helped by his daughter's autobiographical novel) and part the story of Tigay's search, as he uncovers virtually every angle possible to find either the scroll or definitive evidence of what happened to it and whether it was legitimate. Tigay is almost obsessed and no detail is too small for him to follow up - and, often, to travel worldwide - to unearth more clues.

(I could only think of one thing Tigay didn't do, where he found an actual photo of the scroll in the British Museum but it was impossible to read so he felt that was a dead end. I wondered why he didn't enlist an expert in trying to tease out the text from the photo, something that can be done nowadays.)

In the end, it looks like he found the real answer about the scroll.

But the conclusion isn't the point. The fun of reading this book is the journeys, both Shapira's and Tigay's.

If you are looking for something different to read over Passover, this is an enjoyable read.

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Book review: Pumpkinflowers, by Matti Friedman

I am very behind in my book reviews, and I need to write them before I forget the books!

Pumpkinflowers is a truly great book. It tells the story of the tail end of Israel's first Lebanon war, from first person perspectives of the soldiers who were defending one specific unremarkable hill in Lebanon, named Pumpkin, that was deemed critical at the time.

Friedman is an excellent storyteller and a really great writer. It is clear that he is also a fantastic researcher as well, in putting together sources to build a seamless story, especially in the first section of the book.

That section describes Avi, a soldier at the Pumpkin who was sent there soon after what was known as the Pumpkin Incident, where Hezbollah attacked the soldiers there and for a brief time put up a Hezbolah flag - and then publicized it. It was an early example of how a militarily meaningless action can become a great victory in the public relations war, and it showed how warfare itself is changing.

Avi's story is told in his own words and ends in a very unexpected and heartbreaking way which highlights Friedman's considerable writing talent.

The second part of the book is Friedman's own story as a young soldier at the Pumpkin. Here he really has a chance to show off his talent of observation. It is the story of the mundane, highly regimented life of low-level soldiers, following orders to obtain objectives they cannot possibly understand, with weeks of boredom punctuated with occasional dangerous and deadly incidents.

Yet it is much more than that, because that story of the soldiers at Pumpkin is the story of Israel in Lebanon at large, at a point where no one wanted to talk about it. This was during the Oslo process and people were intoxicated at the idea that peace was possible. The low level Lebanon quagmire was an embarrassing sideshow, yet there were real actors in that show, some who died way too young.

In the final part of the book, Friedman narrates his final visit to Pumpkin, coming as an American tourist to Lebanon a few years later, trying to understand what it all meant.

I'm not doing the book justice in this review. Just read it.

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Book review: "The Aleppo Codex"

I love Matti Friedman and decided I want to read all of his books. I had already read "Spies of No Country," although I didn't review it, and I recently ordered The Aleppo Codex and Pumpkinflowers.

The Aleppo Codex, circa 930 CE, is one of the most important books ever written. It was an attempt to codify the entire Hebrew Scripture, with all vowel marks and cantillation marks, as a single standard, since Torahs are written without vowels and they were only known by tradition.

Friedman's book runs through two parallel histories. One is the actual history of the codex, as it was written in the Galilee and then traveled to Jerusalem, where Crusaders held it for ransom which was paid by rich Egyptian Jews. It was then brought to Cairo, used as a reference by Maimonides, and then made its way to Aleppo, Syria, where the community zealously guarded it for centuries. Friedman brings the details to light, including the theory that the writer of the Codex was in fact a Karaite and not a Rabbinic scholar.

The other history is what happened to the codex in the days and years after the UN voted to partition Palestine. The official story is that crazed Arab antisemites destroyed the synagogue and burned its contents, including the Codex, and the surviving pages were smuggled to Israel where it was entrusted to the State.

The reality is much more complex, and much messier. Friedman spent a great deal of time trying to break the wall of silence by the Syrian Jewish community surrounding the codex. They regarded the book as a talisman that would protect them.

Friedman unravels much of the mystery, but not all of it.

The story is not complimentary to the State of Israel. The Syrian community did not want to part with the book and Israel managed to take it from their members with a combination of subterfuge and an unfair, secret trial. Anti-Mizrahi racism underlies a lot of the plot.

The remaining mystery is what happened to most of the missing pages. They were not burnt, as had been assumed, but nearly all of the Pentateuch is missing - yet the book appears to have been largely intact with perhaps only a few missing pages when it was retrieved after the pogroms. The Syrian community remains mum on that issue, with rumors of some people having individual pages that they still use as a mystic protection.

The one man who may have possessed the bulk of the missing pages, a haredi rare book dealer, was murdered in 1989. The trail goes cold after that.

Friedman is a gifted storyteller as well as a dogged reporter. He brings to life the Crusader siege of Jerusalem, with Muslims and Jews both defending the city, as much as he describes the events of 1947 and later. Although much of the mystery remains, he has brought to light a great deal about the Aleppo Codex that was hushed up by both Israel and the Syrian Jewish communities of Israel and abroad. As always with Friedman, The Aleppo Codex is a very worthwhile read.

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Anti-Zionism explained in Yoram Hazony's The Virtue of Nationalism

I enjoyed reading Yoram Hazony's The Virtue of Nationalism. I want to center this review on Hazony's theory of modern anti-Zionism.

To oversimplify, the book is a defense of nationalism as opposed to imperialism. Nationalism is defined as being loyal to one's nation and letting other nations do their own thing; each nation is free do decide on the best way to govern yet each maintains its own national character. Imperialism is a philosophy where the ideas of one nation are imposed on others that might have different ways of thinking because the ideas are superior to all others, so imposing them is for the greater good.

Modern Europe is in many ways a response to Nazism; the horrors of Hitler were so great that we must do everything possible to avoid anything that resembles it in the slightest. But Europe, specifically the EU, makes two very horrible mistakes.

One is that they look at Nazi Germany as being the outcome of extreme nationalism. Because of that, they regard all nationalisms with suspicion at best and hostility at worst.

Yet Nazi Germany was not nationalist - despite calling itself National Socialism. Nazi Germany was imperialist. The Third Reich was meant to rule over Europe and to impose its racist and antisemitic philosophy worldwide.

The EU's connection between nationalism and Nazism is completely wrong.

The second mistake is that the EU, by trying to impose a single standard of law and regulations across Europe, is imperialist itself! The irony of an imperialist Europe, being largely led by Germany, as an answer to the imperialist Third Reich, is painful.

(The major difference between the two is that Europe has effectively outsourced its defense to the United States, so in that way it is a protectorate. Yet its philosophical underpinnings are imperialist.)

Europe looks at Israel as a nationalist endeavor - which it most certainly is. (Hazony brings much evidence that early philosophers of nationalism got their ideas from the Biblical description of the Jewish kingdoms, where individual tribes banded together for defense, one of the major functions of a nation.) Since Europe is traumatized by World War II and mistakes Nazism as nationalism, it views Israel as a potential nationalist danger.

Hazony makes a stark distinction between what lessons Israel and Europe learn from the Holocaust. Israel looks at the slaughter of Jews and says that a national entity could have defended them; Europe looks at the same slaughter and says that Nazi "nationalism" is the cause and that is what must be stopped to ensure it doesn't happen again.

As Hazony writes (p. 206):

In both paradigms, the fact of Israel takes on an extraordinary significance because of the identity of the Jews as the victims of the Shoah. For Israel's founders, the fact that the survivors of the death camps and their children could be given weapons and permitted to train as soldiers under a Jewish flag seemed a decisive movement of the world toward what was just and right. It could in no sense make up for what had happened. But it was just nonetheless, granting the survivors precisely the empowerment that, had it come a few years earlier, would have saved their loved ones from death and worse. In this sense, Israel is the opposite of Auschwitz.

At the same time, Israel takes on extraordinary significance in the new European paradigm as well. For in Israel, the survivors and their children took up arms and set themselves on a course of determining their own fate. That is, this people, so close to the Kantian ideal of perfect self-renunciation only a few decades ago, have instead chosen what is now seen as the path of Hitler—the path of national self-determination. It is this that lies beneath the nearly boundless disgust so many feel toward Israel, and especially toward anything having to do with Israel's attempts to defend itself, regardless of whether these operations are successful or unsuccessful, irreproachable or morally flawed. In taking up arms in the name of their own national state and their own self-determination, the Jews, as many Europeans and others now see it, have simply taken up the same evil that led Germany to build the camps. The details may differ, but the principle, in their eyes, is the same: Israel is Auschwitz.

Therefore, Hazony stresses, it doesn't matter what Israel does or doesn't do - its very existence as a nation willing to defend its people is proof of its inherent immorality.

Antisemitism is not the driving factor of anti-Zionism, according to Hazony. He says that Europe is also antipathetic towards all (European-origin) nations that embrace nationalism. This is why they are so upset at Britain after Brexit, at Trump's America, at some eastern European countries - because those countries insist on making their own national decisions and not to be bound by the rules and international institutions and protocols and standards pushed by Europe (e.g., the ICC, the Kyoto Protocol.). I am reminded of the Carter-era US arguments when abstaining from the 1980 UNSC Jerusalem resolution that emphasized how the portion that demanded that no country establish embassies there was an unacceptable violation of national sovereignty. To the Left, every nation must give up some independence to be part of the world community, and the US has always resisted that to varying degrees.

I'm not so sure that antisemitism is not a major factor in European anti-Zionism - it seems to me the vitriol against Israel by the European Left is much greater than that against the US or Britain. But Hazony's theory is intriguing.

As far as non-European countries such as Arab nations are concerned, Hazony claims that Europe and the Left subconsciously do not consider them to be full nations but savages. In this, they are recalling Kant, who theorized three stages of mankind's development, from savages to nations to a higher moral order where all nations federate under one rule of law. European anti-nationalists look at themselves as being at the highest level, at the US, Israel and Britain at the second level, and the rest of the world still at the level of savages, from whom nothing can be expected. I'm not so convinced of this argument; it seems to me that the anti-colonialism of the Left is driving them to regard all non-whites as noble people whose immorality is the fault of the West.

It is always a treat to read Hazony. And this is a very important book.

(Naturally, any mistakes in summarizing Hazony's arguments are mine alone.)

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Book review: God and Politics in Esther, by @YoramHazony

I already knew that Yoram Hazony was brilliant from his "The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture" and I have always wanted to read his book about Esther. I was not disappointed.

Megillat Esther is perhaps one of the best-known stories in the Hebrew Scriptures, but Hazony's analysis in God and Politics in Esther reveals themes and depths that I never imagined.

Hazony's main thesis is that Esther is a book about politics. More specifically, it is a blueprint on how Jews must act politically in the Diaspora, since Esther is one of the few Biblical stories that takes place primarily when Jews are under foreign rule. He presents Mordechai as being a master politician, becoming well known among King Ahashverosh's advisors and able to see things from multiple perspectives (his interpretation of the rabbinic assertion that Mordechai knew 70 languages.)

Esther, his cousin and adopted daughter, was his protege in understanding how to gain favor from those who know her. For example, when Esther was to be presented to the King to spend the night, she only wants to adorn herself according to the advice of Hegai, the king's chamberlain, and nothing more. Hegai has a vested interest in finding the perfect mate for the king, and he knows the king well, so Esther in this case trusts him implicitly, which makes him prefer her over the other girls, and helps contribute to the king finding favor in Esther as well.

Mordechai and Esther both want to use politics to their advantage, and Mordechai doesn't want either of them to make a big deal about their Jewishness. But things change when Haman becomes the king's vizier. Hazony explores the question of why Mordechai didn't bow down to Haman - why he suddenly was willing to make waves, and endanger the Jewish people, which is not a very political thing to do. After all, Jews are allowed to bow to royalty and to those close to royalty, as the story of Joseph shows.

Before Haman, the king had a series of advisors that would help the king make the best decisions. After the episode of the attempted coup against the king that Mordechai foiled, Ahashverosh became more paranoid about his advisors, and he essentially hired Haman to be the only confidant. This changed the entire texture of the kingdom as Haman arrogated himself to be close to a deity himself, making all decisions as an all powerful being - an idol. This crossed the line from a politician that a Jew can work with to one who is a mortal enemy, as idol worship is abhorrent. Mordechai, essentially alone, started a one-man protest against the new order of Persia which only accelerated when Haman convinced Ahashverosh to destroy all the Jews.

Hazony brings numerous parallels between the events in Esther and those of other Jews who were in high political positions in foreign lands - mostly Joseph and Daniel. Interestingly, he is harsh on Joseph, who had to walk the line between pleasing Pharaoh and doing what is best for his people - if he crosses the line, his ability to help his family would plummet to zero, so he spends more time protecting his position than using it to full advantage.

Esther, once she understood the gravity of the situation, realized that she must risk her position to save the Jewish people, something Joseph never really did. Joseph's brilliance in saving Egypt was a contributor to the Jews ultimately becoming slaves; he saved them from immediate starvation but was too paralyzed to go beyond that. Esther risks it all.

Her plan is brilliant. She gives her husband reason to become jealous of Haman by inviting both of them to what should have been a romantic banquet for two, starting a chain of events where the king is unable to sleep that night, worrying about whether Haman is becoming too close to the Queen which prompts the events allowing him to be reminded of Mordechai's saving his life. When he asks Haman how to honor someone, his answer reveals to the king that Haman has unlimited ambition including to the throne itself. This all primes the king for the second banquet, which brought Haman's downfall.

But the story is not done. The king shows no interest in saving the Jews, and for two agonizing months Mordechai and Esther wait while Haman's followers prepare for all out war on Jews. Esther must once again put her life on the line to ask for a solution, one which he delegates to Mordechai to find a way not to contradict his existing edict.

God and Politics in Esther weaves through its pages an entire philosophy of politics itself. Beyond that, Hazony includes essays on antisemitism, the morality of the Jews' war on its enemies, and an extended treatise on how God is - and isn't - a part of the Esther story which famously doesn't mention God once. Hazony convincingly argues that there is no distinction between what we call "miracles" - unexplainable phenomena that help save Jews - and things that seem natural or prompted by man's actions. The Tanach says that "God was with" many men who did actions that seem to be quite natural. God may be hidden since the times of the Prophets, but He is there.

The ideas that Hazony brings applies to all eras. Rabbis famously studied the story of Jacob preparing to meet Esau before they would meet with despotic rulers to plead their case for the Jews; this book makes one think that Diaspora Jews who enter politics should closely study Esther.

Moreover, Jews who avoid politics even at the grassroots level should reconsider that decision. Change happens when you are willing to make waves and act independently.

Especially in these weeks before Purim, this is a book that will make you look at Esther in ways you never imagined.

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Book review: "Harpoon: Inside the covert war against terrorism's money masters"

Harpoon: Inside the covert war against terrorism's money masters by Shurat HaDin's Nitsana Dershan-Leitner, published in 2017, is an important chronicle of how Israel, as well as the US, identified the importance of cutting off the money supply to terrorists.

Traditional anti-terrorism methods would follow the operational organization chart of the terror groups, using human and electronic intelligence to find the top people and arrest or kill them. But Israeli intelligence officers in the 1990s realized that when you starve terrorists of their funds, they can't mount any attacks. How to do that is a challenge, though.

The book follows Meir Dagan, legendary head of the Mossad, as he learned the importance of the money trail and became also the head of a task force, codename Harpoon, across Israel's financial, legal and intelligence experts aimed at disrupting and stopping terror financing.

As time went on, several methods emerged of going after the money. Dagan ensured that when Israel went after terrorists during the Second Intifada, they would take all financial records and computers that would allow them to reconstruct the networks of payments and sources.

Another, cruder method was to directly attack sources of money during wartime. Israel bombed banks in Beirut during the 2006 Lebanon War, which meant that Hezbollah couldn't pay their fighters, and - according to the book - Hezbollah asked for a ceasefire when they ran out of money. Similarly, Hamas gave up in the 2014 war after Israel traced a huge cash shipment that was smuggled in through Gaza tunnels to Hamas' main money man, Mohamed el-Ghoul, and blew up his car and all the money.

Also in this category was the spectacular assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, Hamas commander and financier of Hamas rockets, in Dubai. Such acts ensured that any of the accountants and money-men for terror groups would think twice and spend much more time protecting themselves, meaning less time to do damage.

A very effective method, and one that Derahan-Leitner knows well, is using the legal system to sue terror groups and their financial institutions in friendly countries. Some of these break new legal ground, and now banks are much more responsible for keeping track of who they provide services to.

The book's blurbs talk about how it "reads like a thriller." Not really. There are a couple of interesting episodes, though not directly attributed to Israel or the US, where a major Hezbollah financier was convinced to invest in a sure-thing investment in Doha; after seeing astonishing returns he convinced Hezbollah leaders including Hassan Nasrallah to invest a total of about a billion dollars. The company vanished along with their cash.

The sources of terror financing were Islamic charities throughout the world, Iran, the PLO skimming money from aid given to them by Europe and the US to build a state, and a huge criminal enterprise that Hezbollah and Iran set up in Venezuela and Africa (as well as the US) to make money off of illegal drugs, prostitution, cigarette smuggling and the like, and laundering these through purchases of items like cars.

Many of the episodes mentioned in the book were tactical successes but the major money machine from Iran and Hezbollah criminal enterprises continued to churn out huge amounts of cash for terrorists. Mentioned although not stressed in the book are US sanctions against terror groups and their sponsors, mostly Iran. Israel cannot do this alone - it had to lobby the US over years to understand the importance of money for worldwide terror. The current sanctions against Iran are one of the single most important things possible to choke off terror financing in the Middle East.

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Book review: "The Orchard," by Yochi Brandes

The Orchard is a novel that ties together literally scores, probably hundreds, of Talmudic stories and expressions into a compelling narrative of Rabbi Akiva, the pre-eminent Torah sage of the generation after the destruction of the Second Temple.

The author, Yochi Brandes, who wrote it in Hebrew, masterfully weaves the legends along with the halachic discussions to create a thoroughly modern book that is feminist and even Zionist. Most of the major figures of Rabbinic Judaism of the first and second centuries CE are intertwined in the story.

The book's voice is Rachel, the wife of Rabbi Akiva, the strong willed daughter of the rich Kalba Savua who rejects her betrothal to the brilliant Rabbi Ishmael and instead chooses to marry 40-year old Akiva, an illiterate shepherd in Kalba Savua's employ. Rachel convinces Akiva to go to a yeshiva and become a Torah scholar, leaving her alone and struggling for many years with her two children.

Akiva goes to study but remains silent during discussions until his brilliance is recognized and revealed. Akiva himself is stunned that his loving wife sent him away and assumes, in his modesty, that she no longer wants him. In fact she realizes that he cannot achieve his potential while he relies on her own wisdom and advice. But she is still bitter that he never returns until circumstances force him to.

In the book, Rachel has uncanny intuition and is the unseen protagonist in many Talmudic stories, as are the other strong women in the book: Imma Shalom, the wife of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus and sister of Rabban Gamaliel, and Beruriah, who in this story is Rachel's daughter's best friend.

Brandes describes the political divisions between the Schools of Shammai and Hillel, and in the book Akiva is used as a pawn by leaders of each camp who assume he would be on their side. The politics between Jews and Sadducees, as well as Romans and between different schools of thought for how Torah should be interpreted, are all part of the story where Akiva is given prominence.

The book even has a small subplot about the birth of modern Christianity, where Saul/Paul - in this story, Rabbi Eliezer's maternal uncle - says that Jesus is the actual messiah, but only for non-Jews. He wants to set up a religion where Jews are revered as the Chosen People as a way to counter the existing antisemitism from the pagan world. His sister Judith, another woman who sees things clearly, strongly objects and predicts that Christians will become the Jews' biggest persecutors.

Even the famous Passover seder of the five rabbis in Bnei Brak makes a pivotal appearance in this book.

The Orchard itself is the famous story of how Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Elisha and Rabbi Akiva used esoteric methods to visit the heavenly abode. Ben Azzai died, Ben Zoma (who in this story is betrothed to Akiva's daughter) goes mad, Elisha becomes a heretic and Akiva emerges unscathed. The actual vision is revealed in the novel as an ingenious explanation of their reactions.

We all know that Rabbi Akiva's end is not pleasant and it is elaborated upon as a result of his support of Bar Kochba rather than his teaching Torah, as most traditions state.

For people who actually learn the Talmud, it is necessary to recognize that this is wholly fictional, and many Talmudic stories are twisted to fit the narrative. It is easy to be upset at seeing how the stories we know are changed, and indeed there is a danger of not knowing where the truth ends and fiction begins. Brandes does a brilliant job in taking many disparate stories and even halachic rulings and making them into a consistent story. The book will likely irritate the more didactic. For those who can look past that, it is a remarkable achievement that describes the mindset of the leading Jews in that crucial point in history and how their decisions allowed Judaism to survive in the critical years after all seemed lost.

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Sarah Tuttle-Singer's "Jerusalem Drawn and Quartered" : A Book Review (Mike Lumish)

Writing about Sarah Tuttle-Singer's work sometimes gets me into trouble. Perhaps that is why it is fun.

Her Jerusalem Drawn and Quartered: One Woman's Year in the Heart of the Christian, Muslim, Armenian, and Jewish Quarters of Old Jerusalem is a poignant and transgressive memoir. It is about love and hatred, happiness and pain and family. This book is very personal and Tuttle-Singer writes in a casual style about her life as a young woman who recently made aliyah. She attempts, layer by layer, to expose her feelings and her life from her journey as a blondie Jewish kid growing up around Los Angeles grappling with the fact that she watched her mother die from cancer.

It is a story of growing into adulthood in the Old City with two children, an absent ex-husband, a rapist, Arab stone-throwers, taxi-drivers with opinions, and the never-ending conflict before her eyes as she explores Jerusalem, sometimes by rooftop at midnight, as the new media editor for the Times of Israel.

Tuttle-Singer is (or was) torn by the fact that her son will shortly be called into the IDF. As a Californian Jew and Israeli who cares about the Jewish people, she is ripped between love and fear. I cannot begin to imagine what that must feel like. Tuttle-Singer knows that she is raising her children in a wild part of the world and shortly she will probably give up her young son to the Israeli military.

The value of Jerusalem Drawn and Quartered is that it is deeply personal. This book is not a political analysis, although it has definite political implications. It is not a history text, although history darkly hovers in the background. It is a memoir of a young Jewish woman learning about Israel and the Old City through exploration from childhood to adulthood. This is a painful story of a woman who has devoted herself to understanding what it means to be a Jew and to raise her children within Eretz Israel.

I have written about Sarah Tuttle-Singer before and although we are not friends, we are certainly not enemies. She is also despised by many who I know within the Jewish community, both Israeli and diaspora. Nonetheless, this is a book that should be read because it is honest, from the heart, and intelligent.

Naturally, this does not mean that I do not have my criticisms.

The virtue of Tuttle-Singer's writings is her appeal to basic human decency and her joy in social exploration. She is a hopeful "progressive" raising two children in Israel and what she wants more than anything is peace. Who doesn't? One of the difficulties with Tuttle-Singer's writings, however, is in the grey line between beautiful description and hyperbole. She is excellent at the former but often wanders into the latter, but that is a minor criticism. What she struggles with most is -- aside from her rape by the "Grey Man" in Jerusalem and the death of her mother -- is finding a balance within the never-ending conflict between Israeli Jews and Israeli Muslims.

The blood and the murder and the intifadas are always present in the background. Her fear for her own children is always there. Where she seems to find healing is in the gold between the cracks. Among the themes of this book this one struck me as central:

"Do you know what they do with broken objects in Japan?" my mom had asked me after my first heartbreak, when I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, my heart shattered into several jagged pieces. "They don't throw them away, sweet girl. They repair them. They melt gold and mend the everyday clay objects with the precious modern material."

This is precisely what Tuttle-Singer is endeavoring to do with her book. She wants very much to heal "the broken places" with "gold," i.e., with human decency and understanding because not only does it make it more beautiful, but stronger, as well.

What saddens me about Tuttle-Singer's writings, both in this book and in her Times of Israel column, is that there are reasons why she is not well-liked among many within the pro-Jewish / pro-Israel community. The primary reason is that she often seems to favor the Arabs over the Jews in terms of "the conflict." I do not doubt that she would take extreme exception with that characterization, but as a progressive defender of the underdog, it is natural as day. The problem is that there are about 400 million Arabs surrounding 7 million Jews who, for the most part, do not want those Jews in their midst.

Sarah does not seem to quite get that.

It, therefore, saddens me that she has earned the malice of many of my friends.

But I also understand why.

They see her as squishy and naive in the face of the enemies of the Jewish people and, thus, she is sometimes not trusted. Some even think of her as a traitor to her own people who has hurt some of our best friends, like Ryan Bellerose.

What I think is that she desperately wants peace -- for the sake of her own children and the Jewish people -- and is willing to bend far-over backward in her political thinking toward that effort. I find her writings to be intelligent, well-meaning, and a little naive, but, heck, she's the one who lives in Israel. I am still in California.

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