Izgad is Aramaic for messenger or runner. We live in world caught between secularism and religious fundamentalism. I am taking up my post, alongside many wiser souls, as a low ranking messenger boy in the fight to establish a third path. Along the way I will be recommending a steady flow of good science fiction and fantasy in order to keep things entertaining.
Welcome Aboard and Enjoy the Ride!
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I serve as the faculty advisor (otherwise known as the resident adult) for the political science club here at the Hebrew Academy. We have a very talented and outspoken group of guys and even a few girls and I am honored to be able to work with them. Read More »
Izgad »
The character on the television show Lost that I relate to the most is Benjamin Linus. He is a morally ambiguous character, who always has a plan. He is the sort of character whom you may have a gun pointed at, but he really is the one who has you where he wants you. Read More »
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(Part I) I wanted to scream at the audience around me: don’t you people understand. This society of nineteenth century Victoria England was one in which the vast majority of people, accept for a narrow elite, lived in a poverty that we cannot even imagine. Read More »
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In the recent Jewish Action, Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, one of the leading rabbinic authorities for Modern Orthodox Jews, reviews a collection of essays, titled the Eye of the Storm, written by his Haredi colleague Rabbi Aharon Feldman. Read More »
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Robert K. Massie, in his biography of Peter the Great of Russia, notes about the Hapsburg emperors of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century were far more interested in being good Catholics and pleasing God then running their kingdom: At Read More »
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This afternoon I went on a belated birthday outing with my friend Lionel Spiegel to go see Alice in Wonderland. I should have been more cautious; the last time I went to the movies with him we ended up nearly laughing through Transformers wiping Israel off the map. Read More »
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Ashley Tedesco over at Jewcy has an article about the students of the Atheist Agenda over at the University of Texas. They offered students the chance to exchange their bibles for pornography, an exchange of “porn for porn.” I would see this as a good example of atheists simply being out to destroy. Read More »
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Here is another ad for Haredi magic Judaism idolatry. I notice that the Haredi rabbis listed in the ad are not actually part of the event. They were just asked to attend. Which means that they have either said no or they have not gotten back to the fine people at Ateret Shlomo (which is another way of saying no). Read More »
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What particularly caught my attention was the passage: “In places that are not visited as frequently you can often have your prayers ‘heard’ more readily in the merit of the Tzadikim that are not visited as often.” I am glad that they put the word “heard” in quotes. Read More »
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Gershom Scholem famously distinguished between two types of Messianism, a restorative Messianism that sought to reestablish the biblical Jewish State and a utopian apocalyptic Messianism that sought the end of the physical political world as we know it. (See David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History pg. 72. Read More »
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Recently I have gotten into the Japanese anime show InuYasha and have been watching it on Hulu. It is about a school girl named Kagome, who is transported, Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe style, to medieval Japan, which functions as a Narnia fantasy world complete with all manner of magic creatures. Read More »
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I have been reading Michael Oren’s Six Days of War about the Six Day War. One wonders if the people who protested his speech at UC of Irvine had read it. It probably would not have made much of a difference if they did. Read More »
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Rich Schapiro of Daily News has an article, “Mosab Hassan Yousef: The Hamas prince who was spy for Israel” on Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a prominent Hamas leader who served as a spy for Israel. On the surface it would appear as if this would argue against Eli Berman, about whom I posted earlier. Read More »
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There is another possible working model for Alfie Kohn’s homework free class that is worth consideration, the book club. When I lived in Columbus I co-chaired a book club for those on the autism spectrum. Every week we would meet for an hour and discuss around fifty pages of a given book. Read More »
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Alfie Kohn, in his book the Homework Myth, offers a challenge aimed at the very structure of how we ask questions about education. Most of the book is devoted to attacking the institution of homework. Kohn, though, wishes to completely overhaul the entire system of education. Read More »
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(Part I, II, III) As with the houses of sexual sin, there is a defense against establishments of racism such as my Aryan coffee shop. Obviously, citizens of good will would have the right to congregate outside my Aryan coffee house to protest as long as no physical harm is done to any of the patrons. Read More »
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To take a short interlude from my discussion of Aryan Coffee, I ended the most recent piece by comparing, as I have done before, homosexuality to eating pork. They both violate verse in Leviticus. Read More »
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(Part I, II) This relatively recent redefinition of rights as protecting not just one’s physical person, but one’s own personal emotional well being, is one of the foundational hypocrisies of modern liberalism and a death blow to a free society. Read More »
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(Part I) Before we continue, I think it is important to make it very clear that we are talking about discriminatory policies practiced by private businesses. Obviously the government has an obligation under the fourteenth amendment to treat everyone equally regardless of race. This is not any different from religion. Read More »
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(The Nazi girl’s youth group, the BDM, served to corrupt the morals of German girls all around. In addition to indoctrinating adolescent and teenage girls in racism and anti-Semitism, girls were also actively encouraged to get pregnant out of wedlock to produce children for the Reich. Read More »
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Last year I gave an interview for the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN), which is a project put out by Ohio State to collect interviews about people talking about gaining literacy in various fields. Most obviously, we talk about reading literacy, but this project also wishes to study computer and internet literacy. Read More »
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In my exchanges with Off the Derech, I have been arguing for the importance of maintaining the sensibility as much as possible that other people may hold different beliefs, these beliefs may be wrong, even manifestly so, but that this does not take away from the legitimacy of the person advocating these beliefs. Read More »
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Our friend Michael Makovi took the opportunity of my previous post on Mr. Dan McLeroy of the Texas school board. To be clear, as someone who teaches history, I do not support the secular narrative of modernity and much of my efforts in teaching modern history are to debunk this view. Read More »
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Historian Russell Shorto has a long article in the New York Times magazine about school board debates as to how to teach the issue of the religious intentions of the founding fathers. Read More »
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(Part I, II) To turn to Islam, this issue of a redeemer to come at the End of Days, the Mahdi, the rightly guided one, as he is known in Islam, lies at the fault line of the major divide that exists within Islam, that of the Sunnis and the Shi’i. Read More »
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(Part I) This two sided millennialist heritage was passed on to medieval Western Christendom. Would Christ return to Earth in human form to reign over the physical world along with the saints in their exalted but still physical bodies? Despite the Read More »
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From the moment I started reading Michael Makovi’s blog, I suspected that he had Asperger syndrome. This was someone who wrote about theory and was willing to follow theory to its practical implications without concern with making friends. Read More »
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One of the central elements of Jewish theology is the concept of a Messiah; that at the End of Days God would send a descendent from the house of King David to redeem the nation of Israel. This Messiah would restore the Jews to the land of Israel, rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem and inaugurate an era of peace and justice for all mankind. Read More »
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I have been engaged in a back and forth with Off the Derech in regards to my last post. I argued that the actions of the anti-Israel students at UC of Irvine are the rejection even of dialogue let alone peace. They are the charge that representatives of the State of Israel are satanic. This is not an enemy that you can ever hope to talk to. Read More »
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Case for Israel Assignment You are to play the role of one the types of people that Prof. Alan Dershowitz attacks in his book, either a Palestinian activist or a member of the hard left. You are encouraged to make up a name and character for yourself. In this guise you are to respond to one of the arguments that Dershowitz makes in the book. Read More »
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