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That Gaza is a hotbed of fundamentalist religion is nothing new. Throughout history, the city has attracted zealous believers, inflamed with high-voltage messianism and a burning passion to save humanity from its earthly suffering. From the time of Samson – who uprooted the gates of the Philistine city in a fit of sacred rage –[…]

While Isaiah Berlin was on his deathbed, Oxford University dean Roy Jenkins asked if he wanted the traditional memorial service in London’s iconic Westminster Abbey afforded to the kingdom’s celebrated figures. Berlin barked, “Hell no. I’m gonna have it in the Hampstead Synagogue.” The British Isle’s best and brightest gathered in the Orthodox Hampstead Synagogue[…]

During the second season of Israel’s “Master Chef,” contenders were asked to cook a meal for someone close to their heart. One of them, Emanuel Rosenzweig, dedicated his meal to his grandfather Franz Rosenzweig, the renowned philosopher whom he sadly never had the privilege to meet. The studio fell silent. The judges – whose menus[…]

It happened in November 1919, almost one whole century ago. World War I was over, the Versailles treaty was signed in Europe, and the Russian civil war was raging, between the reds and the whites – supporters of the old Czarist regime. Jewish refugees from all across Europe, including those deported from Palestine by the[…]

Growing up as a religious boy in Haifa during the 1990s, I used to argue with a secular boy my age, a sharp clever kid called Baruch, named so by his father, a Math Professor in the Technion, who was an enthusiastic fan of the greatest Jewish heretic ever – Baruch Spinoza. I can still[…]

Cliché has it that Election Day is a holiday for democracy. It’s the political moment in which citizens use their mandate to shape the economic, judicial, cultural, educational future and other aspects of the society in which they live to reflect their wishes. Israel’s 71 years of democracy are just a blink of the eye[…]

The Alliance school network has been considered for years an educational empire. More than a million students have graduated from its hundreds of schools in dozens of countries around the world, since its founding in 1860. Much has been written about Alliance’s educational message. Its leaders’ proficiency in integrating the old and the new, tradition[…]

The possibility of imitating winged creatures has always sparked the French imagination. The Montgolfier brothers were the first to fly a human-carrying hot air balloon, and Louis Blériot was the first inventor-adventurer to complete an international flight – from France to Britain in July 1909. Several months after Blériot crossed the La Manche (English) Channel,[…]