Forward.com

Disraeli, Please Come HomeQueen Victoria once asked Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th-century British prime minister, about his “real” religion.…Read more

Studying the Results of the ‘Year in Israel’Since the 1980s, it has become the norm in the Modern Orthodox community for high-school graduates to spend a year studying in yeshivas in Israel. More than 1,000 American 18-year-olds each year, including up to 90% of the graduates of Modern Orthodox schools in New York, immerse themselves in Jewish law, custom and thought, away from the influence of their families, at a critical stage in their lives. Yet until now, there has been no full account of the programs — including who runs them, how they operate and what is really taught in them — and barely any hard data measuring their impact. How do the students change? How long does the change last? And is this responsible change or, as some parents fear, too much, too fast?…Read more

Israel’s ‘Golden Boy’: A New Biography Explores How It Is We Came To Forget Yigal AllonAt the end of the Israeli War of Independence, no military leader was better known than Yigal Allon. A former commander of the elite Palmach unit, Allon, a broad-shouldered sabra, coordinated the battles for the eastern Galilee and the road to Jerusalem, masterminded the defeat of the Egyptian army in the south and captured Eilat. He was, biographer Anita Shapira says, Israel’s “golden boy.”…Read more

Silence Won’t End British BoycottsOver the past three months, the movement to promote a boycott of Israel in the United Kingdom has had some alarming successes. In April, the National Union of Journalists voted to boycott all Israeli goods. In May, the University and College Union decided to promote an academic boycott. And last week, Unison, the biggest trade union in the country, pushed through an “economic, cultural, academic and sporting boycott.”…Read more

Life After DeathFor many non-Orthodox Jews, the concept of the physical resurrection of the dead has always been difficult. Prayers mentioning the doctrine — including such central texts as the second paragraph of the Amidah, in which God is addressed as “the one who revives the dead… and restores life” — have been translated in Reform and Conservative prayer books either very vaguely or completely misleadingly. In Abraham Geiger’s 19th-century German translation, for example, God simply “bestows life here or there”; in the Reform movement’s 1975 Gates of Prayer siddur, resurrection becomes “power over [one’s] own life.”…Read more