Category: America’s Hebrew Connection
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Modern Israel is Anti-West
Reading Time: 5 minutesIn this article, I hope to correct the way progressives think about modern Israel. I think much of our secular sympathy for Jewish people comes from the fact that the Nazi regime hated them and persecuted them. In retrospect, we had that in common with the Jews: the Nazis hated the West…
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Political Zionism is an Anachronism
Reading Time: 7 minutesMorris Jastrow wrote in 1919 that Israel is a ‘glorified ghetto’. When you think about it, the conditions of Jewish life before the Enlightenment have been perfectly reproduced in Palestine.
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Defeating Zionism
Reading Time: 4 minutesIn the last century, events have transpired with no relation to the understanding Morris Jastrow Jr. tried to convey. The result is that in spite of his efforts, Zionism has prospered.
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Question the Far-Right’s Claim to God’s Favor
Reading Time: 4 minutesThe right wing’s narrative describes a world in which evangelical Christians and their allies have God on their side. Normally I wouldn’t disagree–according to Christian doctrine, God is on the side of the human race. But they are actually saying God approves of their politics. They apparently assume this will convince believers…
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Onan and the Patriarchal Agenda
Reading Time: 8 minutesThis issue of women’s rights is at the center of any serious discussion about political reform. It can be argued that women’s rights are synonymous with human rights, or that the repression of women is the foundation of all repression. Every repressive regime in the world has developed a rationale for limiting…
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Nomads and City Dwellers Institutions and Worldview
Reading Time: 16 minutes Ancient Israel: Its Life and InstitutionsRoland de Vaux The Bible is not reliable for ethnographic information. This is especially true in regard to nomads’ and city dwellers’ institutions and worldview. Sheep-breeding tribes who are beginning to settle down were formerly camel-breeders who had begun to raise cattle so they…
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Israel and Iran: War Religion and Politics
Reading Time: 5 minutesIsrael’s apparent desire to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities can’t help but draw Americans in to a very confusing drama. For many reasons Israel is important to Americans. For some American Christians the Jews represent spiritual kin. Still, other Christians, such as Christian Zionists, emphasize the division between Christians and Jews. The relationship…
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The Community of Ancient Israel
Reading Time: 3 minutesRobert Bellah wrote in “The Broken Covenant” that American Civil Religion helped form a unified nation. Bellah assumed civil religion was necessary because America was the world’s first ‘new’ nation, a nation of unrelated immigrants who do not share a common history or religion as the populations of other countries do. However,…