Category Archives: Art and Culture

From Dreams to Nationhood: Surrealism and the Rebirth of Israel

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Surrealism did not invent the language of dreams and symbols; it applied the principles to art. For the Jewish people, that language had long been central: a civilization built on ritual, memory, and meaning encoded in objects, stories, and repeated acts of remembrance.

When Surrealism emerged from Freud’s ideas, it offered a new lens to examine what Jews had already lived: that symbols shape identity, and that dreams can carry a people across time. In the aftermath of Europe’s destruction, that lens reveals a stark contrast: while others turned to common stories to process loss, the Jewish people used their symbolic tradition to rebuild and to turn dream into reality.

Interpreting Dreams

At the turn of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud (1856 Czechia – 1939 United Kingdom) proposed something radical: that the human mind operates on two planes at once. The conscious – ordered, rational, disciplined. And beneath it, the unconscious – restless, suppressed, filled with fears and desires that shape behavior without announcing themselves.

Dreams, Freud argued in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), are the bridge between these worlds.

They are not noise. They are language.

A language built on symbols: recurring forms that carry meaning across individuals and cultures. A house becomes identity. Water becomes birth or transformation. Men are featured as long cylindrical objects while women are enclosed spaces. Objects are never just objects. They are carriers of something deeper, something shared.

Freud did not invent symbolic thinking. He revealed that we are already immersed in it.

And once that realization entered European culture, it transformed how artists saw their role: not as imitators of reality, but as revealers and interpreters of the unconscious.

The Dream Made Visible

Surrealism emerged from collapse.

World War I shattered Europe’s faith in reason. The same systems that promised progress delivered mechanized death. Logic, order, and scientific advancement had not restrained violence but refined it.

Into that rupture stepped André Breton (1896 France -1966 France). In 1924, his Surrealist Manifesto defined the art movement as “pure psychic automatism,” an attempt to express the true functioning of thought, unfiltered by reason or convention. It was a deliberate rejection of the structures that had failed and a search for truth in the raw, unmediated currents of the mind.

Surrealism was not escapism. It was rebellion against a reality that could no longer be trusted.

Artists like Giorgio de Chirico (1888 Greece – 1978 Italy) created haunting spaces – empty plazas, long shadows, objects placed together without explanation. These works do not resolve into meaning. They create a feeling of dislocation, of being suspended in a waking dream where logic loosens its grip.

Piazza d’Italia by Giorgi de Chirico (1913)

Jane Graverol (1905 Belgium – 1984 France) made the point plainly, saying that her canvases are “waking, conscious dreams.”

René Magritte (1898 Belgium – 1967 Belgium), strips away ambiguity and addresses the viewer directly. His 1929 painting The Treachery of Images confronted viewers with the bold statement “This is not a pipe” that what they were seeing was not an object but the symbol of an object.

The Treachery of Images by Rene Magritte (1929)

The statement is instructional.

Magritte is not playing with illusion. He is teaching a fundamental principle: that art is inherently symbolic. The painted pipe is not a pipe but a representation of a pipe. A constructed stand-in for reality. The viewer’s instinct is to collapse that distinction, to treat the symbol as the object itself. Magritte interrupts that instinct and forces recognition.

This is not just a lesson about art. It is a lesson about perception.

Before and After the Abyss

Then came World War II. And the question of perception became far more dangerous.

Before the war, Surrealism destabilized reality with intellectual daring. It exposed how fragile meaning could be, and how easily the mind imposed order where none existed. De Chirco expressed this when he said “although the dream is a very strange phenomenon and an inexplicable mystery, far more inexplicable is the mystery and aspect our minds confer on certain objects and aspects of life.”

After the war, the issue was not mystery. It was blindness.

The European Holocaust was not carried out by a primitive society. It was executed by one of the most intellectually advanced cultures in the world – Germany and Austria – lands of philosophy, music, and scientific achievement.

Civilization did not prevent barbarism. It coexisted with it.

And in that realization, Surrealism’s inquiry deepens.

Consider Magritte before and after the war.

In The False Mirror (1928), the eye is open—wide, consuming the sky. There is a sense of total perception, of a world fully visible, even overwhelming.

The False Mirror by Rene Magritte (1928)

By 1964, in The Son of Man, the face is obscured by a green apple.

The Son of Man by Rene Magritte (1964)

The shift is profound.

The apple is not arbitrary. It carries centuries of symbolic weight: knowledge, intellect, the pursuit of understanding. It evokes Eden, the awakening of consciousness, the belief that human reason elevates and refines. And simultaneously leads to destruction, despair and the loss of paradise.

Here, that very symbol blocks the face.

What if the world’s admiration for European intellect – its reverence for German philosophy, Austrian culture, scientific brilliance – functioned as a kind of blindness? What if our advances in science and knowledge was ultimately too much responsibility for our minds to handle and yielded ultimate weapons of mass destruction to end all life?

A society’s fixation on knowledge obscured the capacity for evil.

The world saw the body and the apple. It saw a society of culture, sophistication, refinement. It did not see the face – the person, the emotion, the intent – behind it. And that face? It saw nothing at all, blinded completely by knowledge.

Magritte’s post-war image reads as indictment of willful misperception. The failure was not that reality hid the truth. It was that humanity chose not to see it.

Myth as Reconstruction

In the aftermath of this rupture, some Surrealist artists turned to mythology, a common history and culture of a now divided Europe. Myth offered what history cannot: a structure to process loss.

Consider Orpheus.

He descends into the underworld to retrieve his lost wife, Eurydice, only to lose her forever when he looks back. The story is not about failure of effort; it is about the finality of loss.

Jane Graverol paints this in 1948, as a Belgian artist from a country invaded and devastated in a war it did not seek. As Europe begins to absorb the reality of the concentration camps – the industrial killing, the desecration of bodies – the imagery becomes unbearable.

The Procession of Orpheus by Jane Graverol (1948)

A woman fused into a chair – half human, half object – evokes not abstraction, but transformation of person into material. A world in which the boundary between human and furniture was grotesquely violated.

This is not simply Orpheus losing Eurydice, disappearing as they emerged from the underworld. It is Europe recognizing that what was lost cannot be restored.

Now consider Ulysses.

After the Trojan War, Ulysses (Odysseus) spends ten years trying to return home to Ithaca. His journey is long, disorienting, and filled with trials – temptation, destruction, loss of companions, divine obstacles. When he finally arrives, he is not recognized. His home has been overtaken. He must reclaim it, rebuild it, reassert his place within it.

Return is not restoration. It is confrontation.

Giorgio de Chirico captures this in The Return of Ulysses.

The Return of Ulysses by Giorgio de Chirico (1968)

The painting is divided.

On the left, a framed work from decades earlier sits beneath a heavy red chair. It anchors the past.

On the right, a frail white chair sits beneath an open window – exposed, stripped, uncertain. The solidity and comfort of the past gives way to fragility.

And in between, Ulysses. Small. Reduced. Rowing across water inside a room forcing the viewer to confront the symbolism.

Water, the symbol of birth, of transition, of beginning again.

He is not standing in triumph. He is navigating between worlds—between what was and what might be.

And then, something unexpected. An open door.

Not the past. Not the fractured present. But a third path.

Ulysses rows toward it. The hero moves toward something new.

The artist, from a country aligned with Germany during the war, was not focused on loss but a chance for a new future within his homeland, inside the familiar surroundings of his room.

The Jewish Path: Beyond Myth

And yet, there is a story that does not fit neatly within this framework of the Surrealist artists of the Allies and Axis. Because the Jewish people after World War II were neither and both.

They were the decimated. A people shattered, displaced, nearly erased – and forced to ask how to return, where to return.

There was no home to reclaim in the way of Ulysses.

No possibility of retrieving what was lost, like Orpheus.

There was only one path forward. Rebirth, in a new land.

And in a way unparalleled in history, they achieved it.

The reestablishment of the State of Israel was not simply political. It was civilizational. A people dispersed for nearly two thousand years, speaking different languages, living across continents, reconstituted sovereignty in its ancestral land.

Here, myth gives way to reality.

In 1968, Salvador Dalí – the master of dream imagery – was commissioned to create a series of 25 watercolor paintings for the Hartford Museum to mark Israel’s 20th anniversary. The timing was not incidental. It came just one year after the Six-Day War, when Israel not only survived existential threat but reunited Jerusalem, returning Jews to their holiest sites in the Old City.

If Theodor Herzl declared, “If you will it, it is no dream,” then Surrealism—an art form built on dreams—became the perfect language to express that transformation.

Aliyah, the rebirth of Israel by Salvador Dali (1968)

Dalí’s Aliyah: The Rebirth of Israel, the centerpiece of the series, captures this moment.

A figure rises, draped in the Israeli flag. And what is more symbolic than a national flag?

Two blue stripes evoking both the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the geographic bounds of the land, while simultaneously recalling the tallit, the Jewish prayer shawl. Nationhood and spirituality fused into a single image.

The figure is not merely standing. He is emerging naked and staring at the heavens.

This is not return. This is creation.

The Arc of Surrealism

Surrealism begins as an education, an attempt to translate Sigmund Freud’s insight into visual form, to show that human beings do not simply see the world, but interpret it through symbols, through dreams, through layers of meaning that sit beneath the surface. It teaches the viewer to slow down, to recognize that an image is not the thing itself, that representation is constructed, that what feels obvious may be anything but.

At its inception, it is a project of illumination, shaped by a Europe that still believed in its own intellectual coherence. From Paris to Brussels to Rome, it carries the confidence of a continent trying to understand itself through deeper, more elusive truths.

But that confidence does not survive World War II.

When Europe fractures, Surrealism fractures with it. The symbolic language remains intact, but it begins to tell different stories depending on where it is spoken.

In Belgium, through Jane Graverol, myth becomes a language of irreversible loss. The world she paints is one in which the human can be reduced to object, where dignity can be stripped away, where what has been taken cannot be restored. The symbols haunt.

In Italy, through Giorgio de Chirico, the question shifts. It is no longer about loss alone, but about return—about what it means to come home when home itself has changed. The past lingers, heavy and inescapable, while the future appears fragile, uncertain, barely formed. And yet, within that uncertainty, there is movement—a quiet insistence on choosing a path forward, even when the destination is unclear.

And then there are the Jews.

Not aligned with either side of Europe’s divide, but decimated, displaced, and exposed. They are not asking how to interpret what has been lost, or how to return to what was. Those paths are closed to them.

They are asking whether anything can be built again at all.

And it is here that Surrealism, for all its depth, turns to the Jews for answers.

Because the Jewish people did not need to be taught how symbols work. They had lived within that framework for centuries—through ritual, through memory, through stories that transformed objects into meaning and meaning into continuity. What Surrealism sought to uncover as theory had already been sustained as practice.

The Passover seder has been educating Jewish children for three thousand years about symbols, about the birth of a nation, and about the dream of Jerusalem.

Surrealism’s arc from the 1920s to 1960s was a story of Europeans wrestling with the mind and meaning before and after the war. It ends when those long familiar with symbolism left their nightmare and made their dream a reality.

Vayikra and Social Media: Rethinking the Korban

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There is something striking about Parshat Vayikra.

Just weeks after the drama of Exodus – splitting seas, revelation at Sinai, a nation coming into being – the Torah seemingly turns inward. The focus shifts to offerings, detail, repetition, and discipline. It feels quieter, but far more demanding.

Because the Torah is no longer telling the story of a history of a people. It is shaping the inner life of a person and framing a community.

Korban: The Work of Drawing Close

The word korban comes from the Hebrew word karov, to draw close.

This is the Torah’s language for repairing distance. Every lapse in judgment, every compromise, every moment we fall short creates space between who we are and who we are meant to be. That distance accumulates. It dulls awareness. It reshapes identity over time.

Korban is the act of closing that gap through deliberate engagement.

The Offering as Mirror

The individual places hands on the offering before it is brought forward. The gesture is direct and personal.

The animal reflects the instinctive layer of the self: of impulse, appetite, anger, ego. The act forces recognition: this energy exists within me. It must be directed, refined, elevated.

The fire on the altar becomes the mechanism of transformation. What is raw is lifted. What is uncontrolled is shaped into something purposeful.

Responsibility leads to possibility.

Atonement Requires Engagement

Vayikra establishes a system built on participation. Atonement unfolds through action, awareness, and presence.

A person must recognize the failure, step toward it, and engage with it. That process creates movement. It slows the instinct to gloss over mistakes and replaces it with something more durable: change that is earned.

The Hidden Becomes Visible

As important, korbanot were not private moments.

They took place in the open, at the center of the community. A person brought an offering in full view; sometimes for something no one else knew, a failure that could have remained hidden.

That public act carries a dual force. It is a form of confession. It acknowledges that private actions shape a public self.

It also reshapes how we see each other. Everyone comes forward. The composed, the successful, the admired, all stand at the same altar. They, too, confront failure. They, too, seek repair.

The system dismantles the illusion of perfection and replaces it with something far more stable: a community built on shared imperfection and ongoing effort.

The World We Built Instead

Today, we have constructed the opposite system.

Our lives are increasingly public, yet carefully edited. Success is broadcast. Struggle is concealed. Identity becomes something managed rather than lived.

Platforms reward the appearance of control, clarity, and achievement. Failure is filtered out. Weakness is reframed or hidden entirely.

The result is a quiet distortion.

People begin to believe that others are living more complete, more resolved lives. The gap between appearance and reality widens. Struggle becomes isolating rather than connective.

In a world like this, growth becomes harder. Without visibility, there is less accountability. Without shared imperfection, there is less permission to confront what is broken.

The Measure Is Intent

The mincha, the simple grain offering, carries the same weight as more elaborate offerings.

A handful of flour stands beside an animal offering because the Torah measures sincerity. The system resists performance and centers intention, reinforcing that what matters is the internal work, not the external display.

The Real Offering

At the center of Vayikra is a simple idea: the offering is the self, refined over time.

The challenge today is not understanding that idea. It is living it in a world that encourages concealment over confrontation.

Vayikra describes a life where people engage their shortcomings directly and are willing to be seen in that effort. The question that remains is whether we can build lives that allow for that kind of honesty again.

From Fiddler to Fear: Broadway’s New Jewish Story

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Broadway has always returned, in one form or another, to Jewish life. For decades, those stories were carried by memory, infused with struggle, displacement, and loss, yet grounded in continuity, humor, and the stubborn persistence of a people that refused to disappear. What has changed is not the subject matter, but the center of gravity. The stage has shifted from portraying how Jews lived to confronting how Jews are targeted.

The Past: Life in the Foreground

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Fiddler on the Roof (2018 in Yiddish) remains the defining example of how Jewish life was once presented. The audience is drawn into a village that feels intimate and alive, filled with arguments between generations, negotiations between tradition and change, and the quiet dignity of ordinary people trying to hold their world together as it begins to shift beneath them.

The violence arrives but it does not dominate the story. It lingers at the edges, a reminder of fragility rather than the force that defines the narrative. What stays with the audience is the humanity that precedes it: the sense that Jewish life contains richness and meaning even as it is repeatedly uprooted, and that something essential survives the disruption.

The Present: History Without Distance

Vienna, and the Illusion of Safety

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Leopoldstadt (2022-3) opens in a world that feels secure, even enviable in contrast to the humbler scenes from the Pale of Settlement in Fiddler – assimilated Jews in Vienna who have embraced culture, intellect, and national identity with the confidence of people who believe they belong. The early scenes are filled with warmth and the easy assumptions of permanence.

As the story unfolds, those assumptions dissolve with unsettling speed. Families thin, names disappear, and what began as a portrait of belonging becomes a study in erasure. The audience is left confronting how completely a thriving world can vanish and how little warning the people inside it seemed to have.

America’s Own Reflection

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Parade (2022-3) brings that realization into the American setting through the story of Leo Frank. His life in early twentieth-century Atlanta ends in a spectacle shaped by rumor, media amplification, and a public willing to accept accusation as truth.

The discomfort of the story lies in its familiarity. The mechanisms feel recognizable, the escalation disturbingly plausible. The setting removes any remaining sense that antisemitism belongs elsewhere or to another time, placing it squarely within the American experience.

A Present That Refuses to Stay Quiet

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Prayer for the French Republic (2024) unfolds in unmistakably contemporary terms, following a French Jewish family as they debate whether their future still lies in the country they call home. The conversation revolves around schools, neighborhoods, and the quiet calculations that shape daily life.

What emerges is not a single defining incident, but an accumulation, a steady normalization of hostility that makes departure feel less like a rupture and more like an eventual step. The question is no longer abstract. It is logistical, immediate, and deeply personal.

Hatred with a Familiar Face

Giant (2026) centered on Roald Dahl, shifts the focus from overt violence to something quieter and, in many ways, more unsettling. Here, antisemitism resides within a figure celebrated for imagination and storytelling, revealing how prejudice can coexist with cultural admiration.

The discomfort lies in how easily such views can be absorbed into environments that otherwise pride themselves on sophistication. Hatred does not require a uniform or a slogan when it is permitted to live comfortably within admired voices. It persists not despite acceptance, but often because of it.

A Pattern Taking Shape

Seen together, these productions trace a continuum across time and place – Vienna, Atlanta, Paris, and the cultural circles of modern Britain – linked by a recurring dynamic. Each begins with a sense of stability, moves through unease, and arrives at rupture. The details differ, but the trajectory remains strikingly consistent.

This repetition carries its own message. It suggests that the issue is not confined to a specific moment or geography, but reflects a pattern capable of reappearing in new forms, shaped by local conditions yet driven by familiar forces.

The Audience and the Mirror

The audiences filling these theaters are often educated, affluent, and deeply engaged with cultural life. They watch these stories unfold, absorb their lessons, and respond with admiration for the craft and the performances.

Yet there is a tension that lingers beyond the applause. The same cultural spaces that elevate these narratives often struggle to confront their contemporary parallels with equal clarity. The distance between stage and reality narrows, but the response to each is not always aligned.

The result is a kind of dissonance: an ability to recognize antisemitism when framed as art, while hesitating to address it with the same urgency when it appears in present-day discourse.

Why This Moment Feels Different

This shift on Broadway reflects a broader change in perception. The conditions once associated with distant history no longer feel entirely removed. The sense of safety that allowed earlier generations to treat persecution as context has given way to a more immediate awareness, one that resists easy separation between past and present.

Recent events have reinforced that awareness. The resurgence of openly hostile rhetoric, the normalization of extreme positions in public discourse, and the willingness in some circles to rationalize or reframe acts of violence have all contributed to a climate in which these stories resonate with a new intensity.

Art does not create that reality, but it reveals how widely it is being felt.

The contrast with earlier eras becomes difficult to ignore. Where once the stage offered a portrait of Jewish life shaped by external pressures, it now presents environments in which those pressures define the experience itself. The richness of daily life is increasingly overshadowed by a sense of vulnerability that cannot be pushed to the margins.

This evolution reads less like a natural progression and more like a recalibration, one that places the question of security at the center. The stories no longer unfold at a comfortable distance. They press closer, asking the audience to consider what they mean beyond the confines of the theater.

Broadway continues to tell Jewish stories, but the tone has shifted in a way that carries unmistakable weight. The warmth that once framed these stories has given way to something sharper, more immediate, and more raw.

The audience is no longer only staring ahead at actors; the Jews attending Broadway turn to the right and left to consider their own lives as living theater.

The Speed of Anger and the Slow Work of Trust

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Anger seems to travel faster than love.

Are we entering a world where the outrageous spreads faster than the beautiful? Where algorithms reward anger more than humor and shouting carries farther than laughter?

These questions feel new. The forces behind them are not.

Human beings have long been drawn to danger more than calm. Psychologists call this “negativity bias.” In a landmark paper, psychologist Roy F. Baumeister and his colleagues summarized it simply: bad is stronger than good. Negative events imprint themselves more deeply than positive ones. We notice threats faster than beauty.

For most of human history this instinct helped us survive. Ignoring a sunset had no consequence. Ignoring danger could be fatal.

Technology did not create our darker impulses. It simply gave them speed. In the digital age that ancient instinct has found a powerful amplifier.

The platforms that shape modern conversation—Meta Platforms, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok—are built to maximize engagement. Their algorithms reward what provokes reaction. Anger drives comments. Outrage produces shares. Conflict spreads faster than reflection.

Researchers studying millions of posts have found a consistent pattern: anger spreads more quickly than joy. The algorithms did not invent hatred. They simply discovered how easily it travels.

Another force quietly reinforces the cycle: incentive. In a fragile and uncertain economy, the fastest path to attention, influence, and sometimes income often runs through the anger storm of social media. Outrage attracts followers. Followers attract status and advertising. The system rewards those who inflame rather than those who illuminate.

The result is a distortion of public life. Rage becomes highly visible while ordinary decency remains largely unseen.

Martin Luther King Jr. captured the difference between what spreads easily and what sustains a society. “Hatred paralyzes life,” he wrote in Strength to Love. “Love releases it. Hatred confuses life. Love harmonizes it.”

Yet the digital public square increasingly rewards the paralysis.

Elie Wiesel warned of a deeper danger: “The opposite of love is not hate. It is indifference.”

In the endless scroll of online outrage, indifference becomes hatred’s silent partner. Cruelty becomes spectacle. People react and move on.

History suggests that hatred has always been loud but rarely durable.

During the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln asked a question that still resonates: “Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?”

The Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn offered a similar warning: “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks expressed the same moral challenge in modern terms:
“The supreme religious challenge is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image.”

Such insights are uncomfortable in a digital culture that constantly divides humanity into enemies and allies.

The deeper problem today may not be that hatred is stronger than love. It may simply be that hatred is easier to distribute, easier to amplify, and increasingly profitable.

Algorithms reward immediate reaction. Beauty requires attention. Humor requires context. Reflection requires time. Outrage requires only a spark.

The digital public square begins to resemble a hall of mirrors.
The loudest voices dominate the room while the quiet majority disappears from view. It becomes easy to believe that everyone is screaming.

Tristan Tate and Andrew Tate in 2023.Credit : AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda

But outside the algorithmic storm the world still runs on cooperation. Families care for one another. Strangers help strangers. People build communities, businesses, schools, and hospitals together every day.

If hatred truly governed human behavior, civilization would collapse within weeks.

The danger is not that hate is winning. The danger is that the systems we built to connect the world reward the worst parts of human nature.

And at the very moment those systems amplify anger, the qualities that restrain anger may be weakening.

The path away from hatred has always depended on patience and trust. Both are under strain.

Technology has shortened attention spans and conditioned us to expect immediate satisfaction. Judgments are rendered in seconds. The slow work of understanding struggles to survive in an environment built for speed.

Trust is also eroding. Artificial intelligence can generate images, voices, and entire narratives that blur the line between the real and the fabricated. As that line fades, people begin to doubt what they see.

A society without patience reacts before thinking.
A society without trust suspects everything.

That makes this a particularly delicate moment. The engines distributing information reward outrage, the incentives encourage it, and the habits that resist it grow weaker at the same time.

The critical question of the day is whether we will recognize that danger in time.

From Exile to Excellence: The Jewish Doctor Who Founded the Paralympics

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The modern Paralympic Games began far from the grandeur of an Olympic stadium. Their origin lies on the grounds of a British hospital, shaped by the vision of Ludwig Guttmann, a Jewish refugee physician who transformed both medicine and sport.

Ludwig Gutmann (1899-1980)

Guttmann was born in 1899 in Breslau, then part of Germany. He rose to prominence as a neurologist specializing in spinal cord injuries. With the rise of Nazism, Jewish professionals were pushed from academic and medical institutions, and Guttmann lost his post as antisemitic laws narrowed the space for Jewish life. During the “Kristallnacht” violence of 1938, he reportedly used his hospital authority to admit Jewish patients and shield them from arrest. Soon after, he fled Germany with his family and rebuilt his career in Britain.

In 1944, the British government asked him to lead a new spinal injuries unit at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. At that time, severe spinal cord injury often led to early death. Patients were confined to beds, vulnerable to infection, and frequently treated as beyond recovery. Guttmann rejected that assumption. He believed survival required more than medical stabilization. It required discipline, ambition, and restored self-respect.

He introduced sport as a core part of rehabilitation. Archery, wheelchair polo, and organized competition became structured therapy. Training cultivated strength and focus. Competition rebuilt identity. Patients who had been defined by injury began to see themselves as athletes preparing for events.

On July 29, 1948, the same day the 1948 Summer Olympics opened, Guttmann organized a small archery competition for sixteen wheelchair athletes on the hospital grounds. He called it the Stoke Mandeville Games. The symbolism was intentional. As Olympians competed in London, injured veterans competed at Stoke Mandeville. Each demonstrated excellence within their arena.

The event became annual and soon attracted international participants. In 1960, following the 1960 Summer Olympics, Rome hosted what is widely recognized as the first official Paralympic Games. A hospital initiative had grown into a global movement.

1960 Rome Paralympics

Guttmann’s work carried deeper resonance because of the era he had survived. Nazi racial ideology had targeted Jews and people with disabilities as unworthy of life. The regime’s euthanasia program murdered tens of thousands of disabled individuals before the broader genocide unfolded. As a Jewish physician forced into exile, Guttmann understood the danger of systems that ranked human worth by race or physical capacity.

The opening of Stoke Mandeville Stadium by Her Majesty the Queen in 1969

His response was constructive and public. He placed disabled athletes on fields of competition and invited the world to witness their performance. Strength, in his framework, was measured by discipline and achievement rather than conformity to an imposed ideal.

Britain recognized his contributions. He became a citizen in 1945, was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1950, and was knighted in 1966 as Sir Ludwig Guttmann. Within medicine, he is regarded as the founder of modern spinal injury treatment. Within sport, he is honored as the father of the Paralympic movement. During major Games, particularly the 2012 Summer Paralympics, his story has been prominently commemorated.

Today the Paralympics stand as one of the world’s largest sporting events, watched by millions. Their origin traces back to a Jewish refugee doctor who believed that dignity could be restored through competition. From the trauma of exile emerged an institution that reshaped how the world understands disability, excellence, and human worth.

Stop Running. Stop Defending.

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The Torah’s first image of Moses is of a man split against himself. Born a Hebrew and raised in Pharaoh’s palace, he lives between worlds. When he kills an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave, the act is instinctive. Yet when another Hebrew confronts him—“Who made you ruler and judge over us?” (Exodus 2:14)—Moses has no answer. He cannot say who he is or why he has the right to act.

So he runs.

The flight is explained as fear of Pharaoh because the attack was discovered. A deeper cause is identity fracture. Moses is caught between Egyptian and Jew, insider and outsider. When identity is unsettled, even a disgraceful question feels existential. Retreat becomes the reflex.

That pattern did not end in Egypt.

Today, for much of the diaspora, Jewish life has carried a similar split. Jews learned to survive by blending, qualifying, and softening. Identity became situational. Answers changed with the room. When questioned—about history, belonging, or the land of Israel—the instinct has often been Moses’ instinct: explain carefully, hedge, or leave the room. Running becomes habit when the self feels divided.

Israel changes that equation.

Israeli Jews do not experience Jewishness as a negotiation. It is civic, cultural, linguistic, and historical all at once. There is no internal argument to resolve before answering an external challenge. Questions that unsettle diaspora Jews rarely destabilize Israelis because the identity beneath them is settled.

Kotel Plaza with Israeli flag (photo: First One Through)

The philosophical approach even applies to non-Jews in Israel. Consider Quentin Tarantino, who married an Israeli, lives in Israel, and raises his children there without explanation or apology. His life models something diaspora Jews are rarely encouraged to try: resolve the split by living a whole integrated self rather than defending it. Belonging practiced instinctually requires no justification.

That clarity was shown clearly in Tarantino’s 2003 film Kill Bill: Vol. 1. In the film, O-Ren Ishii responds to an attack on her heritage immediately and violently. She recognizes the move as an attempt to diminish her and rejects the premise entirely. The table turns the instant she stops answering the charge and starts judging the judge.

For diaspora Jews—and for anyone of mixed heritage—the lesson is continuity. Identity settled internally removes the need for fleeing externally. When the self is whole, interrogation loses its force. Disgraceful questions do not deserve better answers; they deserve exposure and repudiation.

Moses ran because his identity was divided while modern Israelis do not.
O-Ren stands because she knows exactly who she is and will not entertain accusers.

Diaspora Jews today should not need to relive Moses’ uncertainty of self. The work now is not to run, but firmer clarity. Better education and rootedness. Firmer responses.

Stop running.
Stop defending.
Condemn the question—and the room will follow.

The Dry Tree

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Jewish tradition returns again and again to the image of the tree. Sometimes it appears strong and fruit-bearing. At other moments it is reduced, cut back, or left without water. The image endures because it carries history within it—growth shaped by interruption, life that continues through constraint.

The prophets reached for this language when ordinary description failed them.

“They shall be like a tree planted in the desert, that does not sense the coming of good.” – Jeremiah 17:6

“Let not the barren one say: ‘I am a dry tree.’” – Isaiah 56:3

The statement reframes the moment. What looks final and foreboding is often incomplete. The future has not yet spoken.

That tension—between appearance and essence—finds a physical echo in the hills west of Jerusalem, where Yad Kennedy rises from the forest. The memorial marks a life interrupted mid-growth. John F. Kennedy’s presidency and life ended before its natural arc could unfold, and the monument holds that sense of unrealized promise. Surrounded by trees planted in rocky soil, it resembles a tree stump, and invites reflection on lives cut short and on continuity carried forward by those who remain.

Yad Kennedy in Jerusalem Forest

Jewish history has unfolded along similar lines. After the destruction of the Second Temple, Judaism reorganized itself without sovereignty or familiar institutions. Across centuries of dispersion, it adapted under pressure, preserving learning and community in constrained forms. Growth did not disappear; it compressed, waiting for conditions that would allow it to expand again.

This persistence appears vividly in the work of Dr. Mark Podwal (1945-2024). His drawings return repeatedly to the Jewish tree—scarred, truncated, shaped by time. The branches rise unevenly, carrying memory in their grain. Life continues without erasing what came before. Growth is real precisely because it bears the marks of history.

That image resonated deeply with Rabbi Yehuda Amital (1924-2010), founding Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshiva Gush Etzion. A survivor of the Holocaust, Rav Amital rebuilt his world through Torah that could hold rupture and responsibility together. His leadership reflected patience, moral seriousness, and a belief that renewal emerges gradually from damaged ground.

Podwal once gave Rav Amital a drawing of a truncated Jewish tree—reduced in form, yet unmistakably alive, blooming with the promise of a renewed Judaism. The rabbi transformed the image into a small sticker and placed it inside the books of his personal library. Every volume bore the same mark.

Drawing by Mark Podwal about Jewish life springing forth from Jewish texts, used as a sticker in the library of Rav Yehuda Amital (photo: First One Through)

The image spoke directly to his life’s work. Rav Amital played a central role in rebuilding the Gush Etzion community after it was destroyed in the 1948–49 War of Independence, a war in which he fought shortly after moving to the land of Israel after his family was slaughtered in Auschwitz. In the hills south of Jerusalem, homes had been razed, residents killed or expelled, and the area left barren. The return after the 1967 Six Day War was careful and deliberate, rooted in learning, faith, and responsibility. A community grew again where one had been cut down.

Each time Rav Amital opened a book, the image reinforced that lesson. Torah study itself became an act of regrowth.

Rav Amital had the original Podwal drawing framed and placed on the wall of his home. (photo: First One Through)

That insight extends far beyond one community.

In the Land of Israel, Jewish roots run beneath history itself—through exile and return, ruin and rebuilding. Torah and Jewish presence were never uprooted from this land. They were compressed, covered, narrowed to fragments. Learning continued in small circles, in whispered prayers, in constrained spaces. At times the surface appeared barren. Beneath it, roots remained alive.

This is why Jewish life and learning in Israel carry a distinctive quality of reemergence. Yeshivot rise where silence once prevailed. Communities form on ground that held ruins. Torah is studied again in places where the chain of learning was abruptly broken. To the unobservant eye, it can appear improbable—as though life has emerged from wood long dried. To those who understand the depth of Jewish connection to this land, to the Jewish texts which form the basis of Judaism, it is recognition rather than surprise.

The dry tree was never dead. It was waiting.

Jewish continuity does not require ideal conditions. Where roots reach deep enough, water is eventually found. Growth resumes in forms shaped by everything that came before.

Joseph, Yusuf and the Stories We Tell

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The story of Joseph is the longest sustained personal narrative in the Bible. It is a life told end-to-end—youth and jealousy, betrayal and exile, moral clarity under pressure, reversal of fortune, and reconciliation. Jews have lived inside this story for millennia and drawn from it lessons about love misdirected, loyalty earned, leadership forged, and fate revealed only in retrospect.

It begins, uncomfortably, at home.

Jacob’s overemphasis on Joseph—his public favoritism, symbolized by the coat of many colors—fractured the family. It was not Joseph’s dreams alone that enraged his brothers, but the hierarchy their father imposed. Love, unevenly expressed, curdled into resentment. That resentment escalated to violence. The brothers nearly killed Joseph, then sold him into slavery, persuading themselves that exile was mercy.

And yet, the terror of the pit became the opening move in a larger design. Joseph’s descent—into slavery, into prison, into obscurity—ultimately saved thousands from starvation, including the very brothers who betrayed him. The Torah insists on an uncomfortable truth: human cruelty can coexist with divine purpose, without being excused by it.

Over time, the transformation that matters most occurs not in Joseph, but in Judah. The brother who once proposed selling Joseph later rises to moral leadership. Faced with the potential loss of Benjamin, Judah offers himself instead. Ultimatelty, kingship does not emerge from brilliance or dreams, but from responsibility and loyalty. Judah learns what Jacob failed to teach early: leadership is love with a wide visual field.

But this is not the only Joseph story in the world.

Yusuf and Zulaykha: A Different Emphasis

In Islamic tradition, Joseph is Yusuf, and his story unfolds with different texture and purpose. The Qur’an (Surah Yusuf) adds layers absent from the biblical text. Where the Bible does not even name Potiphar’s wife, Islamic tradition gives her a name—Zulaykha—and an entire inner life.

Her attraction to Yusuf begins as physical longing, but in later tradition becomes a spiritual ascent. Love itself is refined—from desire for beauty to yearning for the divine. This is not biography alone; it is allegory.

Persian culture preserved these layers visually, through extraordinary manuscript art that does not merely illustrate scripture but interprets it.

One remarkable manuscript—now on display at the Grolier Club from the collection of the Jewish Theological Seminary (until December 27, 2025)—shows Joseph cast into a well. The details are arresting. Joseph has lost not only his coat of many colors, but his hat and shoes as well—status stripped away piece by piece. The brothers even drop rocks down on him.

Story of Yusuf and Zulaykha from Mashhad, Iran in 1853 by the Jewish scribe Eliyahu ben Nisan ben Eliyahu Gorgi. Digitized entire manuscript can be viewed here

One figure stands apart in the drawing. At the bottom of the scene, a brother sits almost contemplatively. His hands alone are painted with henna, marking higher status. He smokes a long çubuk (copoq)—a dry-tobacco pipe, not the classic Persian water-based hookah—an unsettling detail as Joseph languishes in a dry well below. The image quietly foreshadows hierarchy, survival, and reversal. Even in betrayal, the future is being seeded. This must be Judah, on the side of the well with his five brothers from mother Leah, who is destined to help Joseph out of the pit and rise to fame himself.

One brother seems to connect at the same level of Joseph – at a low point in this story but will rise to fame later in life: Judah

Other images in the Yusuf cycle go further still in the manuscript. Women cut themselves upon seeing Joseph’s beauty (image 70 from Surah Yusuf 12:31). Zulaykha is said to lose her sight from longing for him (image 128). Beauty becomes dangerous, overwhelming, transformative. The Islamic tradition does not deny desire; it seeks to discipline and redirect it.

Zulaykha losing her sight at the end of the story is one of the versions transmitted through the ages

Two Traditions, One Origin

For Jews, Joseph’s story is about dreams and reversals, exile and return, family rupture and national survival. For Muslims, Yusuf’s story adds a meditation on beauty, temptation, and love’s ascent toward God. The Islamic telling emerged nearly two thousand years after the Jewish forefather lived. It is not wrong; it is different.

What matters for us today is that these differences did not need to fight. The stories coexist without trampling on the other.

The same characters—Jacob, Joseph, the brothers—carried distinct lessons without cancelling one another. No one is frozen forever as a villain. Jacob loved poorly but learned. The brothers failed catastrophically but changed. Judah rose. Sacred storytelling, at its best, refuses to eternalize blame.

That restraint is precisely what feels absent today.

Stories, Power, and the Present

The Holy Land, sacred to both Jews and Muslims, is no longer widely treated as a shared inheritance, but as a zero-sum possession. Hamas openly declares that Jews will be wiped out. Clerics in parts of the Islamic world speak in timelines of Jewish disappearance due to their being “enemies of world peace.” This is not interpretation; it is incitement. It rejects the Joseph model, in which history bends—slowly and painfully—toward survival, accountability, and reconciliation rather than annihilation.

And yet, Islamic civilization itself offers another precedent. Islam historically made room for Jewish continuity—absorbing biblical figures, preserving Jewish prophets, and allowing traditions to dovetail rather than collide. Yusuf did not replace Joseph; he walked alongside him. Zulaykha did not negate Potiphar’s wife; she deepened the moral inquiry. Reverence did not require negation.

That capacity still exists.

If Joseph teaches anything durable, it is that sovereignty, survival, and holiness are not insults to one another. Jews returning to and governing their homeland need not be read as a theological defeat for Islam. They can be understood, instead, as another chapter in a long, shared story—one that does not deny difference, but refuses extermination as destiny.

The question is whether we choose that inheritance again.

The Little Drummer Boys of Terror

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President Obama once derided those who warned of Iran’s nuclear ambitions as promoting a “drumbeat of war.” It was a curious charge, especially as his negotiated JCPOA deal paved Iran’s legal pathway to nuclear weapons within a decade—despite Tehran’s unabashed calls to utterly destroy an American ally, and referred to the United States as “Satan.”

The phrase “drumbeat of war” is worth pausing over, because its imagery is meant to point a damning finger at generals and war profiteers, when in fact it refers to a beating passion that comes from a variety of sources.

Music itself teaches us the power of the drumbeat. Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” begins as a whisper—a single snare tapping a faint rhythm—but its relentless pattern swells, layer by layer, into a rapturous explosion. Nothing changes except the intensity. It is a master class in how a simple beat, repeated without interruption, can inflame emotion, tighten resolve, and propel an entire orchestra toward an inevitable climax. Passion grows not from complexity but from persistence.

Cinema took that lesson to the battlefield. Ennio Morricone’s “L’Arena,” born from spaghetti-western duels and later carried into modern war films, shows how percussion can elevate tension into confrontation. Its pounding drums accompanied by trumpets push characters toward conflict; the beat does not merely accompany battle—it summons it. Morricone understood that rhythm can be a weapon, a psychological drumroll that makes violence feel fated long before the first shot is fired.

In American history, drummers were not symbolic ornaments—they were battlefield communicators. The famous “Spirit of ’76” painting captures a young boy and an old man beating time through the fog of revolution. In both the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, the drummer corps relayed commands, kept formation, and lifted morale. Soldiers needed to be adults to enlist, but drummer boys could be barely in their teens. They were not the policymakers of war; they were the ones whose youthful energy pushed men forward into battle.

“The Spirit of ’76” (1875) by Archibald Willard (1836-1918)

It is an uncomfortable truth: the drumbeat of war is often carried not by governments or generals but by the young.

We like to imagine youth as the innocent bystanders of conflict—swept up, exploited, or victimized by forces beyond their control. That is often tragically correct. But not always. In the Middle East, teenage Palestinian Arabs have repeatedly been at the center of anti-Jewish violence. During the knife intifada of 2015–2016, most of the attackers were adolescents. Arabic media even gave them a romanticized nickname: Ashbāl al-Quds—the lion cubs of Jerusalem.

On October 12, 2015, two Palestinian boys, 15-year-old Hassan Khalid Manasra and his cousin 13-year-old Ahmad Manasra, stabbed two Israeli civilians in Jerusalem

They were not pawns in someone else’s narrative. They were active participants in it.

While they were stabbing Israelis in the streets, new legions of drummer boys was forming. The Lions’ Den was inaugurated in the West Bank to unleash dozens of attacks. The United Arab Emirates named a school for children for these young murderers. In the United States, a group calling itself the Palestinian Youth Movement openly glorifies the murderers of October 7 and calls for an intifada on American soil. They harass Jews at universities, shut down bridges, disrupt traffic, and chant for “uprisings”—all under the pretext of activism, and often shielded by tax-exempt organizations like WESPAC.

In the immediate aftermath of the October 7, 2023 massacre by Gazans of Israelis, Cornel West marches with PYM calling for an “Intifada revolution”. West has taught at Princeton, Harvard and Yale, indoctrinating the next generation of American leaders on intifada.

The drumbeat is steady. It is disciplined. And it is aimed squarely at Jews.

Where does this beat begin? It is not in the Israeli cabinet rooms the media delights in blaming. It begins at UNRWA schools, where generations of children are taught that Jews are colonial invaders with no history in their homeland. It echoes through activist teacher unions in the United States, where “decolonization” rhetoric is repackaged into lesson plans that erase Jewish indigeneity. It thunders at the United Nations, where Muslim-majority blocs and their allies advance resolutions asserting that Jews must be removed from Judea, Samaria, and even parts of Jerusalem “by any means necessary.” The young Palestinian Arab terrorist are then shielded from blame and prosecution by the poorly named “UN Coordinator for Middle East Peace.” Laughable if not such a tragedy.

The young listen. And they march.

At Christmastime, the world hears “The Little Drummer Boy”—a melody of humility. A child with nothing to give but a simple rhythm of devotion for a newborn Jewish baby in Bethlehem. A beat based on innocence and purity.

But the modern Middle East and its Western echo chambers have perverted that image.

Today’s little drummer boys are not offering gentle hymns. They are being raised, trained, and celebrated for a beat of hatred—an indoctrinated cadence that valorizes “martyrs,” delegitimizes Jews, romanticizes violence, and promises glory for those who shed blood.

The world should hear the drumbeat. And it should finally ask: Who handed these children the drums? Who taught them that murder is heroism, that Jews are prey, that violence is virtue?

These teenagers did not invent the rhythm—they are marching to a score composed by UN agencies, radicalized teachers, political opportunists, and ideological arsonists who hide behind the language of “justice” while grooming minors for war.

UN Watch’s Hillel Neuer presents new report, “Schools in the Grip of Terror: How UNRWA Allowed Hamas Chiefs to Control its Education System,” to the Italian Senate in September 2025

At Christmas, we think of a young drummer offering a humble gift to a Jewish child in Bethlehem. Alas, today too many young drummers are taught to offer not devotion, but destruction—and the world nods along as if the rhythm were unavoidable. It isn’t.

The beat continues only because we refuse to silence the conductors who train the next generation of drummers to hate.

The Age of Rocks and the Arrogance of History

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To walk the land of Israel is to feel stitched into the fabric of time. Every trail from Beersheva to the Galilee whispers of footsteps that appear in the Bible—not legends, but people who actually lived, planted, quarreled, dreamed, and prayed on this soil. The stones beneath one’s feet carry the gravity of memory. They seem fused to the foundation of the earth itself, like the Even haShtiyah—the legendary rock at the center of the Temple Mount from which creation is said to have sprung.

Rocks in Judean Hills

But that connection is not geological. It is human.

The rocks of Eilat, the oldest in the region, date to around 800 million years. They feel unimaginably ancient to us—far older than Abraham’s tents, King David’s psalms, or the Hasmonean rebellions that command our sense of deep history. Yet even those craggy cliffs and mineral seams are infants compared to the rocks of Canada. In the Canadian Shield lie formations over 4 billion years old—some of the earliest surviving pieces of Earth’s crust. Five times older. A geologic eternity older.

And yet no one reveres those rocks. No pilgrim circles them. No faith assigns them cosmic origin stories. They are “pretty,” not primordial. They are scenery, not scripture.

Why?

Because we measure age in lifetimes. We crown the stones of the Holy Land as ancient not because they are old, but because we are old here—because human meaning saturated this place for millennia. The rocks become vessels for our significance.

It is, in a sense, a subtle arrogance: the centering of human experience as the measure of the world. We treat Earth’s deep past as a backdrop to our stories rather than a reality that dwarfs them. We act as if history begins with us, as if time itself depends on our noticing it.

When we walk these trails—past the ruins of synagogues, the outlines of Israelite cities, the remnants of Crusader walls—we feel connected because these places speak to human time. They anchor us. They dignify us. But the rocks beneath those ruins hum a different message: we are temporary here. Our religions, nations, languages, and conflicts occupy a blink of the planet’s eye.

A dose of humility would serve us well. To appreciate the holiness of our stories without mistaking them for the age of the world.

We walk ancient paths, and the ground reminds us we are all newcomers.