Archive for the ‘judaism’ tag
Proof of Jewishness #
In the forthcoming New York Times Magazine, Gershom Gorenberg explores how hard it is for some be recognized as Jewish in Israel.
In an era of intermarriage, denominational disputes and secularization, Jews have ceased agreeing on who belongs to the family, or on what the word “Jew” means. Ultra-Orthodox Jews increasingly question the Jewishness of those outside their own intensely religious communities. The flood of immigrants from the former Soviet Union to Israel deepened their doubts. In the Soviet Union, when someone with parents of two nationalities received identity papers at age 16, he could pick which nationality to list. A child of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother could put down “Jew.” The religious principle of matrilineal descent was irrelevant.
Reconsidering “The Banality of Evil” #
This is slightly more academic than most stuff I post, but it’s also rather interesting. Tony Judt reconsiders the history of the Shoah — that’s the Holocaust to most — on the western psyche and people in general.
Meanwhile, we should all of us perhaps take care when we speak of the problem of evil. For there is more than one sort of banality. There is the notorious banality of which Arendt spoke —the unsettling, normal, neighborly, everyday evil in humans. But there is another banality: the banality of overuse—the flattening, desensitizing effect of seeing or saying or thinking the same thing too many times until we have numbed our audience and rendered them immune to the evil we are describing. And that is the banality— or “banalization”—that we face today.