“The platitude quotient tends to be high, the rhetoric stately and self-serving, the ritual obsessive, and the surprises few.”
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., 1965
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ANTIGONOS' FAVORITE NEWS AND COMMENTARY SITES
- Brookings Institute
- Commentary Magazine
- David Calling
- Editorial Cartoons
- Hirhurim -- Torah Musings
- Hudson NY
- Jewish Ideas Daily
- Jewish Review of Books
- Middle East Forum
- New York Review of Books
- New York Times
- Salon.com
- Slate
- Tablet Magazine
- The Atlantic Magazine
- The Jewish Daily Forward
- The National Review
- The New Republic
- The Skeptical OB
- The Washington Post
Antigonos has lived for slightly more than 40 years in Jerusalem, and is by profession a Certified Nurse Midwife for 50 years, [just retired in the spring of 2012] in three countries, with an interest in history, Judaism, embroidery and other handcrafts, cooking, and suffers from intense curiosity about the world in general, a generalized cynicism and, occasionally a certain ennui, if not depression, about the way things are turning out.
Blog Archive
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2009
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January
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- Attempting to Conciliate Terrorists
- Ledbetter Bill Advances the Cause of Women
- It Wasn't Just the Jews, Bishop Williamson
- You Cease, We Fire, Episode 2 [or 2000, or some ot...
- It's Been, What, 72 HOURS Already and We're STILL ...
- The Nature of Anti-Semitism
- Reality Check
- Why I'm Not Interested in Obama's Inaugural Speech
- The Reality Behind the Cease-Fire
- Watch the Hands
- It's Not About Israel (or Not Directly)
- Newspeak, Hamas-style
- Or, Isn't Turnabout Fair Play?
- A Whole New Dimension of Daycare
- New Year's Resolutions
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January
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Milon (Glossary)
OLEH: an immigrant to Israel. The root of the word comes from the verb "to ascend". The plural is "olim". A female is an "olah", and a bunch of female immigrants is "olot".
YORED: an emigrant from Israel. The word means "to descend". Plural is "yordim".
MA'ABARA: pl. "ma'abarot". Tent cities which were built as transit camps in the years immediately following Israel's independence, as nearly two million Holocaust survivors and Jews from Arab countries arrived, often only with the clothes they wore.
MEDURA: pl. "medurot". Campfire.
TZENA: austerity, the name given to the period between Israel's independence and the mid 1950s, when times were very tough.
SHEMITTA: every seventh year, the land in The Land is supposed to lie fallow. Since this would lead to starvation, the ancient Sages developed a whole body of law that permitted cultivation using certain methods and/or the legal fiction that the fields in question were "sold" to a non-Jew for the year. Not all the ultra-Orthodox (virtually none of whom are farmers, and who lived for centuries in non-Jewish communities in the Diaspora where this wasn't a problem) will accept these ways around the commandment, and will only eat either imported produce or produce grown at vast expense in trays of soil raised OFF the ground (therefore not technically being grown "in" the Holy Land. Only a Jew would think of this)
CHAMETZ: literally, "leaven". It means all food which it is prohibited to have "in one's possession" during Passover. Different Jewish ethnic groups interpret this in different ways. Obviously yeast and fermented items are forbidden, but some communities will eat legumes and others will not; some will not eat anything made with matzah or matzah meal which has been in contact with water (gebrochts) like matzah balls. Some communities will eat rice, others will not.
TZITZIT: ritual fringes that males wear, often on the edges of a scapular worn under a shirt, or on the prayer shawl worn in the synagogue. There is a precise way to tie them, so that the knots and twists will add up to 613, the number of the commandments in the Torah.
SHAKSHOUKA: Eggs cooked in a spicy tomato sauce. See http://www.recipezaar.com/148450 for a recipe.
TESHUVA: Penitence.
LITVAK: An very Orthodox Jew from Lithuania. The foremost sage in that community, in the 19th century, was the Vilna Gaon, who excommunicated the hassidim as schismatics because of their mystic belief in their "wonder-working" rabbis. The Hassidim promptly returned the favor. "Litvaks" are noted for their minute, but rationalist, dissection of Jewish texts, and have a distinctive accent in Hebrew. The two communities both wear the black long coats (capotes), have long beards and sidelocks, and are often confused by outsiders as being the same.
YORED: an emigrant from Israel. The word means "to descend". Plural is "yordim".
MA'ABARA: pl. "ma'abarot". Tent cities which were built as transit camps in the years immediately following Israel's independence, as nearly two million Holocaust survivors and Jews from Arab countries arrived, often only with the clothes they wore.
MEDURA: pl. "medurot". Campfire.
TZENA: austerity, the name given to the period between Israel's independence and the mid 1950s, when times were very tough.
SHEMITTA: every seventh year, the land in The Land is supposed to lie fallow. Since this would lead to starvation, the ancient Sages developed a whole body of law that permitted cultivation using certain methods and/or the legal fiction that the fields in question were "sold" to a non-Jew for the year. Not all the ultra-Orthodox (virtually none of whom are farmers, and who lived for centuries in non-Jewish communities in the Diaspora where this wasn't a problem) will accept these ways around the commandment, and will only eat either imported produce or produce grown at vast expense in trays of soil raised OFF the ground (therefore not technically being grown "in" the Holy Land. Only a Jew would think of this)
CHAMETZ: literally, "leaven". It means all food which it is prohibited to have "in one's possession" during Passover. Different Jewish ethnic groups interpret this in different ways. Obviously yeast and fermented items are forbidden, but some communities will eat legumes and others will not; some will not eat anything made with matzah or matzah meal which has been in contact with water (gebrochts) like matzah balls. Some communities will eat rice, others will not.
TZITZIT: ritual fringes that males wear, often on the edges of a scapular worn under a shirt, or on the prayer shawl worn in the synagogue. There is a precise way to tie them, so that the knots and twists will add up to 613, the number of the commandments in the Torah.
SHAKSHOUKA: Eggs cooked in a spicy tomato sauce. See http://www.recipezaar.com/148450 for a recipe.
TESHUVA: Penitence.
LITVAK: An very Orthodox Jew from Lithuania. The foremost sage in that community, in the 19th century, was the Vilna Gaon, who excommunicated the hassidim as schismatics because of their mystic belief in their "wonder-working" rabbis. The Hassidim promptly returned the favor. "Litvaks" are noted for their minute, but rationalist, dissection of Jewish texts, and have a distinctive accent in Hebrew. The two communities both wear the black long coats (capotes), have long beards and sidelocks, and are often confused by outsiders as being the same.
3 comments:
Absolutely! Aretha Franklin singing God Save the Queen was pretty surprising though.
It surprises most Americans that the British national anthem is "My Country 'Tis of Thee" :-)
Every now and then there is a movement to change the US anthem to something people actually can sing, but it never goes anywhere. "America the Beautiful" has often been proposed.
Some wag in The Independent suggested that Aretha should have sung I Say A Little Prayer instead given what BHO is up against.
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