Hamas Tacitly Admitted Its Casualty Figures Were Fabricated—but That Won’t Change Anyone’s Mind
Stop playing the numbers game.
April 8, 2025
When God Pours Out His Wrath at the Seder
Real and fake controversy about a powerful prayer.
In the traditional text of the Haggadah, after the meal, there is a brief passage that reads “Pour out Your wrath upon the nations that know You not. . . . For they have devoured Jacob, and laid waste his habitation. . . . Thou wilt pursue them in anger, and destroy them from under the heavens of the Lord!” Some non-Orthodox Haggadahs omit these lines; others include them in Hebrew without an English translation. They made one 20th-century rabbi so uncomfortable that he forged a parallel prayer, which he dated to the 16th century, for righteous Gentiles. (If you refer to yesterday’s newsletter, you can find Ruth Wisse’s embrace of this “eloquent howl.”)
April 8, 2025
What’s Israel’s Strategy in Gaza?
Fighting both to destroy Hamas and to release the hostages.
Anti-Zionist Jews Reject Jewish Peoplehood and Survival
Not an argument for the sake of heaven.
When God Pours Out His Wrath at the Seder
Real and fake controversy about a powerful prayer.
A 16th-Century Handbook for Jewish Women
And what it tells us about the lives of ordinary Jews.