Category: Israel
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Comparing Howard Sachar and Rashid Khalidi’s Accounts of Ariel Sharon’s 2000 Visit to the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif
From Howard Sachar’s A History of Israel: “Ariel Sharon Takes a Walk Its vortex was Jerusalem, traditionally the most explosive ingredient in the Palestinian-Israeli impasse; and its catalyst was Ariel Sharon, the perennial loose cannon of Israeli politics. A year earlier, following Netanyahu’s electoral defeat, the Likud party had overwhelmingly selected Sharon as its new…
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As Long as I’m Still Breathing: Becoming a Transgender Orthodox Jew by Avraham Kolenski
As Long as I’m Still Breathing is a 75-page memoir broken up into seven chapters of first-person past-tense prose and free verse poetry. It delves into Avraham’s struggles with depression and how transitioning to male and converting to Judaism helped give him the strength to stay alive. It tells the story of how he converted…
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Wrestling with Zion by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon
Rating: 4/5, good I found this book in 2015 at the Grove Press booth at the Bay Area Book Festival. It appealed to me because I had seen a lot of pro-Palestinian articles online around the time of Operation Defensive Shield in 2014. My Hebrew school education on the conflict was about as balanced as…