Jesus, Herod and the Irgun — All in One Jerusalem Room

2,700 Years of History Unearthed in Old City Prison

By Ben Sales at The Jewish Daily Forward

(JTA) — When Amit Re’em embarked on a 1999 excavation of an abandoned Ottoman prison in the Old City of Jerusalem, he didn’t expect anything revolutionary.

The dig was primarily aimed at inspecting the site before it was transformed into an event space for the nearby Tower of David Museum, and Re’em, then just 28, hoped at most to uncover some remains of a Herodian palace, or maybe part of a wall from the second century.

He did find those things — along with much more.

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‘Hasidic Rebel’ Shulem Deen on leaving Orthodoxy and losing his children

By Julie Wiener for JTA

Shulem Deen, the former Skverer Hasid who for years blogged under the pseudonym “Hasidic Rebel,” has just published a memoir, “All Who Go Do Not Return” (Graywolf Press). Deen, now 40, describes his sheltered life in New Square, the virtually all-Hasidic village an hour north of New York City, and tells how he lost his faith and, ultimately, his five children. Deen, whose slight Yiddish accent shows his roots, recently sat down with JTA (the interview has been condensed and edited).

JTA: Most memoirs of leaving Orthodoxy include an anecdote about the first time the author ate non-kosher food or violated some other fundamental rule, but yours doesn’t. Do you remember those experiences?

Deen: I remember my first treif, but it was unimportant – a chicken quesadilla at a Mexican restaurant. But who cares? I was totally a nonbeliever by then, but there was nowhere to buy treif in New Square, and I still looked like a Hasid. As for Shabbat, I was ready to violate it way before I did. It just didn’t feel like anything to me.

So you didn’t half worry you’d be struck down?

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Turkey’s Secret Jews

By Leah Falk for Jewniverse

When 17th-century heretic Sabbatai Zevi declared himself the messiah and set about making his own rules for Judaism, he amassed a Jewish following across Europe. None too pleased by the groundswell, Ottoman authorities forced Zevi to convert to Islam. His followers were crestfallen. But a few in the Ottoman Empire followed him into his new faith, and became the Donme, Turkey’s version of Iberia’s “crypto-Jews.”

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The resurgence of neo-traditionalism

by Asher Susser for FathomJournal.org

Asher Susser explains the resurgence of tradition throughout the region and its political consequences  for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He was speaking to a Fathom Forum in London on 10 February.
One of the main failures in Western analyses of the Arab Spring was the underestimation of religion as a factor in Middle Eastern politics. When it began, everybody started talking about the secular liberals. The problem is, the secular liberals are virtually non-existent in Arab society – the people who really matter are the Muslim Brotherhood.

If you want to talk about real political organisation, it is invariably of an Islamist character, these days. I wrote a monograph about this five years ago. I examined the rise of Hamas to power in Palestine, arguing that this was not an exceptional development – it was the rule.

When you have free elections, the Islamists either do extremely well or they win. When Jordan had relatively free elections in 1989, the Islamists of various brands got around 40 per cent of the seats in Parliament. The Jordanians have since then cheated in the elections systematically to keep the Islamists out. They changed the election law, fraud, violence – whatever you like – anything but allowing the Islamists to cash in on a free election.

Why is tradition so resilient? I would cite four factors.

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