AMICHAI: THE TOLERANT IRONY OF ISRAEL’S NATIONAL POET

With no Jewish holidays coming up immediately, we bring you profiles of some well known and some not so well known Jews. Enjoy.

A ‘wonderful’ new collection of Yehuda Amichai’s verse shows the poet’s profound resilience—and the weight of his ghosts

By Adam Kirsch for Tablet Magazine   

In 1944, Ludwig Pfeuffer was a 20-year-old soldier stationed in Egypt with the British Army. Born in Wurzburg, Germany, to a family that had lived there for centuries, the young Ludwig had fled the Third Reich with his parents in 1935 and made a new life in British-controlled Palestine. The British were not exactly popular with the Jews of Palestine—the government had limited Jewish immigration at a crucial moment and continually put off the creation of a Jewish state. But during World War II, with Nazi armies in North Africa, many young Jews had enlisted in the British forces as a matter of self-defense. By the later stages of the war, however, the Germans had been expelled from Africa, and there was little for Pfeuffer and his fellow Jewish soldiers to do in Egypt—except to smuggle weapons and immigrants to Palestine, in preparation for the postwar struggle everyone knew was coming.

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The Most Haunted Leading Man

With no Jewish holidays coming up immediately, we bring you articles of some well known and some not so well known Jews. Enjoy.

In ‘Son of Saul,’ actor Géza Röhrig defies our every expectation of a Holocaust movie hero

By Vox Tablet

The antithesis of nearly every Holocaust movie ever made, the Hungarian film Son of Saul is slim on happy endings. Directed by László Nemes, it tells the story of a member of the Sonderkommando, the Jews who ushered their co-religionists off the trains into the showers and who, after the gassings, cleared those showers out to ready them for the next batch of victims. Saul, portrayed by Géza Röhrig, is shaken out of his numbness and despair by the body of a child who survives the gassing and suddenly, amid the true-life rebellion of the Sonderkommando in October 1944, engages in his own form of resistance.

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Paul Simon: Words and Music

With no Jewish holidays coming up immediately, we bring you profiles of some well known and some not so well known Jews. Enjoy.

By Barbara Pash for Hadassah Magazine

From “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Mrs. Robinson” to “The Sound of Silence,” the songs of Paul Simon have become classics in the American songbook. The Jewish Museum of Maryland is the first stop on a nationwide tour that celebrates the career and creative process of one of the country’s greatest singer/songwriters via 80 artifacts, photographs, recorded songs and videotaped performances.

The exhibit debuted in October in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. The Hall of Fame created it to mark the 50th anniversary of Simon’s career. Twice inducted into the Hall of Fame, he is a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame and winner of 12 Grammy Awards (three of which were albums of the year), among other honors. Simon was involved in the exhibit, for which he recorded an original narrative.

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Today is Zot Chanukah

From OU Staff Writer

The “simple” explanation for this special name for the last day of Chanuka is the Torah reading from the end of Parshat Naso that emphatically announces ZOT CHANUKAT HA-MIZBEI’ACH (when the Torah is summing up the gifts of all the Tribal Leaders.

There is another, deeper meaning to the name. If you want to really know what Chanukah is all about, the answer is THIS, THE EIGHTH DAY OF CHANUKAH – the fact that there are 8 days of Chanukah – ZOT CHANUKAH, this is what Chanukah means. It means EIGHT. EIGHT is our answer to the Greek challenge. They said nature is perfect. They said it is a mutilation of the body to be circumcised. And they forbid us to fulfill that great mitzva of ours, under pain of death. EIGHT represents the step beyond TEVA, beyond nature. MILA on the 8th day represents our challenge to go beyond how we were created and take charge of the completion of our physical and spiritual form. The Mikdash began to function on its higher spiritual level on the EIGHTH day. The Greeks tried to take that away from us too. Torah was given to us on the day following seven sevens. It is an EIGHTH too. And the Greeks tried to take that from us also. With G-d’s help, we prevailed over the Greeks and the triumph is celebrated with an 8 day holiday. This is Chanukah. ZOT CHANUKAH.

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9 Things You Didn’t Know About Hanukkah

MyJewishLearning.com
Hanukkah, which starts at sundown on Sunday, Dec. 6, is one of the most widely celebrated Jewish holidays in the United States. But that doesn’t mean there is nothing new to learn about this eight-day festival. From the mysterious origins of gelt to an Apocryphal beheading to Marilyn Monroe, we’ve compiled an item for each candle (don’t forget the shammash!) on the Hanukkah menorah.

1. Gelt as we know it is a relatively new tradition — and no one knows who invented it.
While coins – “gelt” is Yiddish for coins, or money – have been part of Hanukkah observance for centuries, chocolate gelt is considerably younger. In her book On the Chocolate Trail, Rabbi Deborah Prinz writes that “opinions differ” concerning the origins of chocolate gelt: Some credit America’s Loft candy company with creating it in the 1920s, while others suggest there were European versions earlier that inspired Israel’s Elite candy company. Prinz notes, as well, that chocolate gelt resembles a European Christmas tradition of exchanging gold-covered chocolate coins “commemorating the miracles of St. Nicholas.”

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Why Chanukah matters

How a ‘minor’ holiday unites us, warns against assimilation and helps us feel American

by Jared Sichel for JewishJournal

 There’s a certain narrative about Chanukah that has become near conventional wisdom among American Jews, and it goes like this:

Chanukah is a fun holiday that is big in America, thanks to its proximity to Christmas. But really, it’s a “minor” holiday that is more impactful culturally and sociologically than religiously, and it can’t really compare to the “big” ones of Yom Kippur and Passover.

And that’s all true. But it’s also too simple.   

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Where Chanukah Is Really Big

Hilary Danailova for The Jewish Week   

A little light is nice — but since everything is on a grander scale in Houston, winter truly is a festival of lights, thousands of them, for Chanukah and beyond. You’ll find them twinkling from the windows of houses; illuminating trees and streetlamps in the city’s many characteristic neighborhoods;

the Ann and Stephen Kaufman Jewish Book & Arts Fair at the Evelyn Rubenstein Jewish Community Center, where 10,000 Houstonians annually attend two weeks of literary talks, films, performances, and other cultural programs. Only this weekend, alongside three films, you can catch a concert of Mediterranean folk music by the Berlin-Tel Aviv band Baladino; a culinary demonstration for “The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook”; and an evening with New Yorker cartoonist Bruce Eric Kaplan exclusively for 20- and 30-somethings.
   
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For more great Hanukkah ideas, check out our    page.

For even more great ideas, visit our Hanukkah Holiday Spotlight Kit