Word: halevy
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Autobiographer and Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi was raised on the rim of Borough Park, a section of Brooklyn then heavily populated with deeply religious Holocaust survivors and their American-born children. His father, who came from a small Hungarian village, escaped the death camps by fleeing into the forest, where he hid for a year in a 4-ft.-deep hole. Even as a successful candy wholesaler in the U.S., he felt hunted and angry, especially at the "Nice Irvings," his term for America's assimilated Jews who laughed at Borscht Belt humor and turned, as he said...
...Yossi's world Philip Roth and his fictional double would be dismissed as a Jewish Amos and Andy, a contributor to "a culture of self-abasement and vulgar excess." Young Halevi's heroes were fighting Jews: the Zionist firebrands of the 1930s; the invincible Israeli army; and U.S. extremists like Rabbi Meir Kahane, who founded the Jewish Defense League...
...Halevi looks back on his JDL activities as having been the opportunity to become "at once my father's contemporary and a Yippie." The first connection was with "the danger zone of Jewish history" and the second with "the funhouse of America." In 1972 Halevi protested the Soviet restriction of Jewish emigration by throwing chicken blood at a touring troupe of Ukrainian dancers. He was also part of a group tossed out of Moscow for demonstrating at a visa office...
...intifadeh, that preceded the agreement, Palestinians killed 161 Israelis; in the 20 months since the agreement was signed, the toll is 123 dead. Most were victims of suicide bombings carried out by Muslim extremists. "You get the feeling we're collectively going over a cliff," says student Sarah Halevi. "I completely don't trust anything the Palestinians say." Seeing the killers celebrated in the streets of Gaza, and how gingerly Yasser Arafat's governing Palestinian Authority has treated them (at least until very recently), most Israelis wonder whether it is possible ever to make peace. Even among Israeli peace activists...
...being perhaps more than of believing. Being Jewish is feeling the past in one's bones and living all out in the present; it is Job's chutzpah as well as his submission to God; it is the lingering melancholy which the 12th century writer Judah Halevi called the "aching heart of nations," and it is sharp humor, often directed at oneself. For all his changes, the American Jew has not lost these qualities; in fact he is making them, more than ever, a gift to the world...