The Reform academics, dubbed The Running Commentary, trash-talked that their creative approach to the game would prevail against the Conservative U.J.'s obsession with the rules. The U.J. players, nicknamed Sixty Daf and Out (a reference to the 60 pages of Gemarah necessary for ordination), responded by voicing their fear that if their Reform colleagues found any of the softball rules ethically troubling, perhaps they would just toss out the rule book.
PM Sharon quotes a popular Hasidic song in a speech to the nation, and the Forward gives us its history:
Rabbi Nachman himself took the image of life's task as a fearless crossing of a narrow bridge from an older Jewish source — namely, the medieval Jewish philosopher Yedayahu Bedershi or Yedayahu of Beziers . . . . from a 13th- and 14th-century philosopher to an 18th- and 19th-century chasidic rabbi, and thence to a popular song and a speech by the prime minister in the Knesset, we can trace a straight line. Only in Israel!I've sung "Kol ha'olam kulo" for years, and it tickles me to think Sharon is using it as a morale booster.
From the archives: A review of two new books on the topic of Conspiracy Theories as Comfort Food.
. . . . initially . . .it was the Masons and then the Catholics who were victims of the conspiratorial imagination. Anti-Mason and anti-Catholic political parties drew a large following both in the early and middle parts of the 19th century. The revival of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915 was as much directed against Catholics as it was blacks, and during Al Smith's run for the presidency in 1928 the Klan promoted the rumor that his election would result in the pope ruling the United States. It was only after World War I, against the background of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and Henry Ford's dissemination of the "Protocols," which accused Jews of being bent on world domination through their leadership of Bolshevism and international finance, that Jews in the United States became the target of widespread conspiracy theories. They have remained so ever since.Lucky us. I had a few choice words for devotees of Mr. Ford some years ago.
The yin and yang of Jewish-related music: "Old-school Jewish hip-hop":
. . . . clarinet virtuoso David Krakauer said . . . "Through some kind of magical alchemy I can't really describe, he found a way to make a kind of contemporary dance genre really evoke an old Brooklyn of the 1940s" . . . . Listening to Mr. Dolgin's "Hip-Hop Seder" is akin to re-experiencing a lifetime of seders — including some you wish you had never attended — while hallucinating in a roomful of record-freaks.
and the influence of Jewish ritual on George Frideric Handel:
Purim, the Jewish celebration of the ultimate mixed marriage, must have had powerful resonance for the Age of Enlightenment. And only in such a heady epoch could there have been such an extravagant concatenation of international juxtapositions: The Saxon composer Handel, on a carefree, youthful music "research" jaunt in Italy, stayed with Jews in Venice and was captivated by their community's colorful celebration of Purim, retelling a story of Jews in ancient Persia. After returning to his adopted country of England, Handel discovered a 1689 play about Esther with choruses by French playwright Jean Racine in an English version by Thomas Brereton, and asked his drinking companions John Arbuthnot and Alexander Pope to fashion a libretto. Handel's "Haman and Mordecai" premiered in 1718 to great acclaim. . . . Handel created many other oratorios, usually premiered during Lent, and he based almost all of them on Jewish subjects or texts.
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