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SAPIR Journal A quarterly journal of ideas for a thriving Jewish future. https://sapirjournal.org/archive/

When an October 7 photograph showing Israeli festival-goer Shani Louk held by terrorists in the back of a pickup truck w...
28/06/2024

When an October 7 photograph showing Israeli festival-goer Shani Louk held by terrorists in the back of a pickup truck was awarded a prestigious photojournalism prize this spring, many were outraged. The photograph reminded SAPIR Managing Editor Philip Getz of a similar image on a Roman coin produced after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. The message engraved on the coin — “Judaea Capta” — was refuted only after the birth of modern Israel nearly two millennia later.

In 71 c.e., the Roman emperor Vespasian, in consultation with the senate, issued a commemorative coin to honor his son Titus’s suppressio...

Jews are very good at adapting to bad situations, writes the entrepreneur Ariel Beery. This ability may even be at the h...
27/06/2024

Jews are very good at adapting to bad situations, writes the entrepreneur Ariel Beery. This ability may even be at the heart of Jewish survival. But resilience itself carries an unseen tax. It can flatten a society’s culture and put it at risk of ever-more-serious peril. Today, an embattled Israel is all resilience: “all will and no dream.” A return to Zionism’s original pioneering mentality offers a different approach.

What I fear most,” longtime Israel activist and executive Jessica Ovadia shared with me on a call just after Iran’s massive air attack ...

Is there a baseline difference between Israeli and Palestinian cultures that led to the gross atrocities committed by Ha...
26/06/2024

Is there a baseline difference between Israeli and Palestinian cultures that led to the gross atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7? Historian Richard Landes thinks so, pointing to contrasting value systems based on guilt and honor.

In the week following October 7, the annual cycle of reading the Torah from beginning to end began anew. It was a welcome reminder that Jew...

Gripped by an antisemitic fervor, social media platforms have enabled the illiberal and anti-Israel spiral at universiti...
26/06/2024

Gripped by an antisemitic fervor, social media platforms have enabled the illiberal and anti-Israel spiral at universities and the rest of American life. Jewish on Campus co-founder and CEO Julia Jassey explains how her movement cuts against the grain in the fight back on campus and beyond.

As the leader of a grassroots organization of Jewish college students, I’m often asked by prospective students and their parents which ca...

In a spirited conversation, Amy Spitalnick of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, David Cygielman of Moishe House, an...
25/06/2024

In a spirited conversation, Amy Spitalnick of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, David Cygielman of Moishe House, and Aaron Katler of UpStart speak frankly with SAPIR Associate Editor Felicia Herman on where American Jewish leadership is going. The interview reveals the battle of ideas that will shape the direction of American Judaism.

Before October 7, Jews in Israel and the United States had lived for decades in an exceptional period of safety, comfort, and assurance. Wh...

American Jews have a bigger stake in Israel than ever, writes Linda Mirels, president of the UJA-Federation of New York....
25/06/2024

American Jews have a bigger stake in Israel than ever, writes Linda Mirels, president of the UJA-Federation of New York. In part this is because they are targeted for backlash to Israel’s actions: “When Israel is on the defensive, so are we; when Israel is wounded, so are we.” She argues that it’s time to start acting not as passive donors, but as investors and partners.

From the beginning of the modern Zionist movement, global Jewish philanthropy has been essential to the State of Israel’s existence. The ...

Israeli security has long been backstopped by the United States, the Jewish state’s strongest ally since the later years...
24/06/2024

Israeli security has long been backstopped by the United States, the Jewish state’s strongest ally since the later years of the Cold War. But recently American support has begun to crack, especially on the Left. How can Israel’s American backers overcome vocal far-Left critics to ensure a future of strong bipartisan support? Michael Koplow, chief policy officer of the Israel Policy Forum, thinks the answer lies in winnowing what he calls “the 1948ers” from “the 1967ers.”

Everywhere one looks on the American Left, its relationship with Zionism is under extreme strain. Given the changes in both movements —...

For former Israeli deputy national-security adviser Chuck Freilich, the Israeli intelligence community was much to blame...
24/06/2024

For former Israeli deputy national-security adviser Chuck Freilich, the Israeli intelligence community was much to blame for the nation’s astonishing security failure on October 7, when border areas around Gaza were overrun by forces dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state. He argues that, in addition to its missteps in the lead-up to the assault, Israeli intelligence must reckon with long-term damage to its reputation — perhaps its most important tool of deterrence. Freilich lays out how its standing can be rehabilitated.

January 31, 2018, was a bitterly cold night in the Shirobad neighborhood of Tehran. In an exquisitely timed and synchronized operation, Mos...

In the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, “Judaism revolves around three sacred entities: God, Torah, and Israel.” SAPIR a...
21/06/2024

In the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, “Judaism revolves around three sacred entities: God, Torah, and Israel.” SAPIR asked three rabbis from the United States and Israel — Tamar Elad-Appelbaum, Lauren Holtzblatt, and Zohar Atkins — to contemplate what these concepts have meant for themselves and their communities since October 7, and how they serve as sources of spiritual resilience for all.

There is a kabbalistic tradition that Jewish faith and spirituality consist of three elements: God, Torah, and Israel. When these three...

When psychologist Pamela Paresky and journalist Maayan Hoffman spoke with October 7 survivors in communities including O...
21/06/2024

When psychologist Pamela Paresky and journalist Maayan Hoffman spoke with October 7 survivors in communities including Ofakim and Nahal Oz, they noticed a pattern: “The ability to bounce back after adverse events ... relies on a sense of agency, taking responsibility for one’s own emotional experience, and a commitment to keep moving forward even when times are hard.” They argue that these “civic impulses” are important to the health of all communities, and to liberal democracy itself.

Gitit Zamir Botera has been the manager of the National Digital Center (NDC) in Sderot since 2022. Part of her role is to help those living...

Two days after 99 of his friends and family were massacred, Kibbutz Be’eri director of agriculture Moti Barak was back a...
20/06/2024

Two days after 99 of his friends and family were massacred, Kibbutz Be’eri director of agriculture Moti Barak was back at work to rebuild his community. British Israeli writer Nicole Hazan tells his story.

Israel’s future lies in the Negev,” David Ben-Gurion often said, and that future is our present. Large swathes of the western Negev for...

Historian S. Ilan Troen, whose daughter and son-in-law were murdered on October 7, reflects on a Passover seder unlike a...
20/06/2024

Historian S. Ilan Troen, whose daughter and son-in-law were murdered on October 7, reflects on a Passover seder unlike any other. “Last year, we enjoyed the seder with Deborah, Shlomi, and their children at our home in the Negev where we ended with the traditional cry, ‘Next year in Jerusalem!’ This year we were indeed in Jerusalem,” he writes. “But it didn’t feel entirely like redemption.”

The prefix “re” acquired special significance in the Zionist experience in 1922 when the League of Nations authorized the “re-constit...

For Jews, “the weight of our past is in our blood,” writes Noa Tishby, and the Jewish response to traumas like that of O...
19/06/2024

For Jews, “the weight of our past is in our blood,” writes Noa Tishby, and the Jewish response to traumas like that of October 7 is genetically embedded. While the eruption of antisemitism has taken American Jews by surprise, they carry the tools of resilience inside them.

Feeling like an outsider is nothing new to me. Things seem peachy now, but as a child I was not what you would call a popular kid. I had a ...

What do we gain from fretting about the future of democracy? Quite a bit, argues Bret Stephens, charting a lengthy histo...
19/06/2024

What do we gain from fretting about the future of democracy? Quite a bit, argues Bret Stephens, charting a lengthy history of democratic pessimism in the United States. Not only does our current pessimism obscure the significant accomplishments of the United States in the 21st century, it contains a secret for strengthening our future. Still, antisemitism has him worried.

We live in an era of democratic pessimism. This is true in at least three senses. First, people in democracies today are much less hopeful ...

Drawing on the story of Israel’s sixth prime minister, Menachem Begin, offers some hard-knock lessons in Jewish dignity...
18/06/2024

Drawing on the story of Israel’s sixth prime minister, Menachem Begin, offers some hard-knock lessons in Jewish dignity. Even after being shipped to a Soviet Gulag, “Begin never forgot to be a Jew.”

To stand with Israel these days exacts a social cost. Friendships can be strained, dinner parties disrupted. Expressing the view that Israe...

Dan Senor and Saul Singer remind us that Israel may be more prone to wither from internal social division than war. Thei...
18/06/2024

Dan Senor and Saul Singer remind us that Israel may be more prone to wither from internal social division than war. Their investigation into the core social factors that make Israel resilient illuminates what can be done to maintain the collective spirit reignited by the war against Hamas and renew Israel’s national promise.

Friday, April 12: Iran is expected at any time to launch an unprecedented direct attack on Israel, perhaps including ballistic missiles arm...

In his introduction to the issue, SAPIR Publisher Mark Charendoff notes that “being a Jew in 2024 and beyond is going to...
17/06/2024

In his introduction to the issue, SAPIR Publisher Mark Charendoff notes that “being a Jew in 2024 and beyond is going to be a different proposition than it was just a few years ago.” But he reflects across centuries to understand how crisis often ends up being a boon for the Jewish people. It’s an important lesson for those “on ‘the Western front’ of the war.”

In an essay in Commentary in 1994, the historian Jonathan D. Sarna pushed back on the Jewish community’s then-obsession with “continuit...

Historian Daniel B. Schwartz asks Mark Twain, Augustine, and Baruch Spinoza for the secret of Jewish resilience — and do...
17/06/2024

Historian Daniel B. Schwartz asks Mark Twain, Augustine, and Baruch Spinoza for the secret of Jewish resilience — and doesn’t find what he’s looking for. Instead, he lands on a forgotten story of a converso in medieval Spain for the answer. He finds in a quote from the man an enduring truth beyond history and philosophy, “something visceral, instinctive; something that stems not from reason, not even from faith, but from the kishkes.”

The English word “resilience,” from the Latin resilire, literally means “to rebound.” For most of its 400-year history, the term wa...

In this retrospective to 1967, historian Norman Goda finds an instructive model in the way French Jews countered the ram...
29/03/2024

In this retrospective to 1967, historian Norman Goda finds an instructive model in the way French Jews countered the rampant antisemitism that followed Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War. After enduring attacks from political leaders, including President Charles de Gaulle, the Jews of France responded “by asserting their Jewishness without sacrificing their claim to France’s promise of universal dignity.” With an eye toward the present, Goda writes, “They dissected and flatly rejected the linguistic ruses of the day, understanding that the anti-Zionism of the Third World and the European Left was little more than antisemitism cloaked in a different kind of duplicity.”

Hamas’s October 7 slaughter of Jews in Israel and the Israeli response in Gaza have created a stunning backlash against Jews in the name ...

In a dispatch from the forgotten Jewish commonwealth of Jodensavanne in present-day Suriname, Anshel Pfeffer unearths th...
29/03/2024

In a dispatch from the forgotten Jewish commonwealth of Jodensavanne in present-day Suriname, Anshel Pfeffer unearths the remains of an experiment in self-rule that thrived almost 300 years before the establishment of Israel. A state-sponsored archaeological expedition finds much richness in this forgotten period of Jewish history, which stands as a reminder of the long journey it has been to stable, modern Jewish sovereignty. Still, many of the lessons to be learned are from failures rather than successes, including the fact that many in the community owned slaves.

The boatman cuts his outboard motor and the rusty launch drifts with the sluggish current of the Suriname River. Try as I might, even with ...

This Sunday at 10:30 AM ET, join us at Lehrhaus, a Jewish tavern and house of learning in Boston, for a conversation wit...
28/03/2024

This Sunday at 10:30 AM ET, join us at Lehrhaus, a Jewish tavern and house of learning in Boston, for a conversation with David Zvi Kalman, Joshua Foer, and Felicia Herman. Get your tickets to “Judaism at the Speed of Technological Change” now.

Join us to explore what it means for Judaism to remain a relevant, adaptable moral force far into the future.

There is another threat lurking in the foreign-policy apparatus of many democracies: the career diplomatic corps of nati...
28/03/2024

There is another threat lurking in the foreign-policy apparatus of many democracies: the career diplomatic corps of nations including Canada, the UK, and many countries in the EU. Former Canadian ambassador to Israel Vivian Bercovici explains how and why they have long harbored a baseline of hostility to Israel’s needs and have often attempted to thwart the decisions of the elected officials they are supposed to serve. She recommends several straightforward ways to address the problem.

In late December, the murder by Hamas of a Canadian-Israeli citizen, 70-year-old Judith Weinstein Haggai of Kibbutz Nir Oz, was confirmed. ...

It can be hard to believe that the Republican Party of George W. Bush, which defined itself by a policy of global interv...
28/03/2024

It can be hard to believe that the Republican Party of George W. Bush, which defined itself by a policy of global interventionism, is the same one that Donald Trump leads today. Former ambassador Eric S. Edelman charts the ebb and flow of Republican isolationism in the 20th century, explaining why the now-resurgent ideology is so dangerous for Israel, not to mention America’s other alliances that keep the world safe.

In 2016, during the waning days of Barack Obama’s two terms in office and with the imminent prospect of Hillary Clinton’s election, Pre...

The 2020 Abraham Accords, an unprecedented advance in regional realignment, have been tested during Israel’s ongoing war...
27/03/2024

The 2020 Abraham Accords, an unprecedented advance in regional realignment, have been tested during Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas. But for Israeli political scientist Moran Zaga, this major transformation has proven surprisingly durable, and has benefitted Israel in the current crisis. As the ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates hold firm, one open question is whether UAE’s attempted rapprochement with Iran will change the geopolitics even further.

Early in the pandemic, a friend of mine introduced me to another friend of his, an Emirati living in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Knowin...

As Donna Robinson Divine illustrates in her critique of academic Middle East studies, deep scholarly understanding of th...
27/03/2024

As Donna Robinson Divine illustrates in her critique of academic Middle East studies, deep scholarly understanding of the region has been hindered by a myopic narrative, pervasive in the academy, that is fundamentally antagonistic to Israel. The politicization of the field has resulted in a failure to explore the long-running local divisions and dynamics at play in the Middle East, and casts the drama of the region as one involving the Western colonial powers who left generations ago.

I was recently told a story about a Jewish professor of Islamic studies who, some years ago, was seen standing bewildered outside the hotel...

The war in Gaza is frequently disfigured by many forms of falsehood and deflection. Perhaps chief among them is the way ...
26/03/2024

The war in Gaza is frequently disfigured by many forms of falsehood and deflection. Perhaps chief among them is the way in which Israel has become the repository of misdirected Western guilt. Professor and journalist Josef Joffe investigates the history of antisemitism punctuated by three different eras: “The first chapter was written by Christianity. …The second chapter was authored by Hi**er, who went from faith to race. … Chapter 3 unfolds as we speak.” This third chapter is an exercise in what Freud calls “redirection,” in which Israel is made by European onlookers to represent Europe’s own sins.

The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz,” runs a bizarre quip ascribed to the Israeli psychiatrist Zvi Rex. To deconstruct ...

Professor and journalist Susie Linfield dissects the curious assurance of intellectuals who, despite priding themselves ...
26/03/2024

Professor and journalist Susie Linfield dissects the curious assurance of intellectuals who, despite priding themselves on their capacity for complexity, have fallen prey to the oversimplifications of root-cause commentary that passes for analysis. Using Noam Chomsky as a prime example, Linfield notes that “the American Left’s most influential thinker is popular precisely because of his monolithic thinking.” The appeal of such simplicity has proven great: “In the past several years, root-cause thinking has become prevalent in much of American academia, the ‘mainstream’ media, and a swathe of corporate America.” Linfield suggests that the single-minded pursuit of the root of a problem obscures the messy, multifactorial network of causes inherent in any social dynamic.

Immediately after news of Hamas’s October 7 massacres broke — before it was known just what had happened, before the shock of the c...

Noam Weissman, host of the Unpacking Israeli History podcast, has been educating students young and old about Israel for...
25/03/2024

Noam Weissman, host of the Unpacking Israeli History podcast, has been educating students young and old about Israel for years. He’s noticed a disturbing trend: The Jewish community’s passion for Israel is greater than its knowledge on the subject. “How can we look at ourselves in the mirror and ask our young people to represent Zionism when they do not know what Zionism is?” Fortunately, there is a simple, cost-effective solution.

Polly put the kettle on, we’ll all have tea.” This endearing 19th-century nursery rhyme is catchy, but one is left wondering, “Put th...

As the executive director of Natan, a fund that supports early-stage Jewish nonprofits, Adina Poupko knows better than a...
25/03/2024

As the executive director of Natan, a fund that supports early-stage Jewish nonprofits, Adina Poupko knows better than anyone the importance of efforts to expand the tent of the Jewish community. But she wonders whether an overemphasis on those at the margins can result in overlooking the center. “I’m not suggesting that we put our support for the outliers on hold,” she writes. “But it’s critically important to remind ourselves as a community that our first responsibility must be to support those already firmly in the Jewish, Israel-supporting tent.”

It is my job to pay close attention to outliers. As the executive director of the Natan Fund, a foundation that supports early-stage nonpro...

Off the heels of the passage of a bill in the House of Representatives that would ban TikTok if it refuses to comply wit...
22/03/2024

Off the heels of the passage of a bill in the House of Representatives that would ban TikTok if it refuses to comply with regulations, Ani Wilcenski takes a cold, hard look at how Hamas has found so much support on social media — and why many Jewish influencers have stayed silent. But she also identifies friends who have been unabashed in their support for the Jewish state and offers suggestions for how the community can help amplify their message.

After George Floyd was murdered in May 2020, Susan Korn was outraged. The 30-something founder, CEO, and creative director of Susan Alexand...

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