On Hanukkah, Women As Role Models

Part of our Countdown to Hanukkah series

MyJewishLearning.com Staff Writer

Although Judah Maccabee and his father Matathias are the most famous characters in the Hanukkah story, the holiday also commemorates two Jewish women: Judith and Hannah.

The First Book of Maccabees and Second Book of Maccabees, which chronicle the story of the rebellion that inspired Hanukkah, were not included in the Bible, and are instead part of a body of texts known as the Apocrypha. Also in the Apocrypha is the Book of Judith, which tells how this heroine stopped the siege of Jerusalem by decapitating Holofernes, a major military leader for the enemy.

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Citing boycott, Jewish academic refuses to help Israeli child

Asked for info on horses, Dr. Marsha Levine tells schoolgirl she’ll answer ‘when there is justice for Palestinians’

By Times of Israel Staff

An  expert in the history of horses has rebuffed a request for information from an Israeli girl, citing as the reason for her refusal Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

Shachar Rabinovitch, 13, wrote recently to the British-American researcher Marsha Levine, who is Jewish, that she was doing a school project about horses and requested details about the domestication and breeding of early horse species.

According to a Facebook post by her mother, Shamir, on Monday, Levine replied: “I’ll answer your questions when there is peace and justice for Palestinians in Palestine.”

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Holiday Heartache – Helping Divorced Kids Get Through

Part of our Countdown to Hanukkah, this article deals with families of divorce and how to navigate the holidays.

Barbara Aiello for The Times of Israel

In  a few days Chanukah begins and then it’s time for Christmas. But for many children whose parents are divorced, the holiday season can be at best difficult and at worst traumatic.

Before I became a rabbi, I served on the board of a counseling service for divorced families. Later, when I became a rabbi, I became a support group leader for families and children who suffer through all the issues surrounding the breakup of a marriage. I’ve seen a lot.  From my own experience as a divorced parent to my work as a counselor, I’ve come to the conclusion that the most difficult divorces involve children and the areas that are most contentious surround child support, custody and visitation.  And each of these is exacerbated when the holidays roll around

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Ramen Latkes with Sriracha Mayo

By Whitney Fisch in The Nosher for MyJewishLearning.com

Living in LA is like a foodie Wonderland. On almost every corner in almost every neighborhood, there is something delicious to eat.

And the foodies here in LA do a lot of things right, but by far the top three are tacos, sushi, and ramen. In fact, ramen is so good here it inspired me to make my own just recently. Being the typical Jewish mother that I am I made far too many noodles. The next morning it occurred to me, “why not fry up some leftover ramen noodles,  slap some sriracha mayo on top and have ourselves a nice ramen-inspired latke?!”

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Compromise for Now, the End of Israel for Later

David Pollock for Mosaic

That’s what Palestinians say they want. What does this bifurcated attitude mean for policymakers?

Against the bloody background of stabbings and other deadly violence in Israel and the West Bank, Daniel Polisar’s thorough analysis of Palestinian polling data, “What Do Palestinians Want?,” makes essential reading for anyone interested in more than just the grim daily headlines. His central point—that the majority of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have long supported “armed struggle” against Israelis—is not only accurate but a fact regularly distorted by media focus on the seemingly “individual” nature of today’s terrorist incidents. Polisar’s conclusions, moreover, are well grounded in exhaustive research into the mounds of survey data that have piled up ever since the first Oslo accords of 1993—which is when I myself started to work with Palestinian colleagues in launching the first scientific polls of the Palestinian population.

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The Bataclan Was Named For This Jewish Operetta

By Ilana Sichel for Jewniverse

Haaretz writer Vivian Eden just unearthed an amazing historical factoid: the Bataclan, the stately Paris theater that is now synonymous with bloodshed and horror, takes its name from an operetta written and composed by two 19th-century Jews.

Composer Jacques Offenbach was born to a German cantor, and came to Paris to study music. The libretto he set to music, “Ba-Ta-Clan,” was written by Ludovic Halévy, the son of a Parisian Jew who converted to Christianity for marriage. (Though with a name like Halévy we can’t imagine he made a very convincing Christian.)

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Thousands of Holocaust papers found in Budapest apartment

Documents cataloging residents of Hungarian capital in 1944, just before Jews were packed into a ghetto and shipped to death camps, found inside wall

By Times of Israel Staff

Renovations at an apartment in Budapest uncovered thousands of documents from 1944 cataloging the Jewish population of the Hungarian capital, according to a recent report in the Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung.

The 6,300 documents were found in a wall of an apartment in Budapest that had recently cracked. When the landlord started fixing the wall, the bundles of paper were found stashed inside.

The papers date from just before the confinement of Hungarian Jews to the Budapest ghetto in 1944. In May of that year, city officials drafted a list of the city’s population, differentiating between Christians and Jews, detailing addresses, identities and cost of rent. The newfound documents detail residents from just four of the city’s districts.

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