Philosophy

The following is a guest post by an anonymous contributor. I found their response articulate, poignant, and personal, stating in different tones a lot of the issues and personal grievances I struggled with myself. I relate a lot to the feeling of having given my all, trying to be...

My brother joins the Israeli military tomorrow. My main emotion is sadness, which is saying a lot because I don't usually let myself feel much sadness. Yosef is joining a special-forces unit, which means he'll be doing harder, more brutal training, get exposed to more dangerous situations, and do...

The bible, so full of contradictory statements, is a perfect setting for Rorschach tests. It’s all just spilled ink on the page. You see what you want to see. You want airy fairy hippy shit? You got it. “Sons you are, to the lord your God.” You want dogmatic, oppressive, hardline world views? You’ll...

Without the Holocaust, Zionism would not have succeeded. It was a fringe movement, ignored by assimilated secular Jews as unnecessary, and by religious Jews as oppositional to its beliefs. The Holocaust was critical for the formation of the state of Israel - it shifted the views of Jews around...

Unofficially, using mainly common sense as our guide, we can think of two definitions of terrorism. The term gets thrown around rather freely, and is used by governments to police and invalidate a wide range of individual and social behaviors. Definition #1: Deliberate Attacks on Civilians Part of the terrorist...

As I continue to publicize my criticism of Israel and Zionism, a specific kind of criticism has emerged from people in my life, frequently enough that it has become a pattern. The gist of their argument is this: "We agree with you in theory that Israel is doing many terrible...

I have been on a journey of deconstructing religion for the last 9 years, and this site is a testament to the variety of angles in which I've (literally) attacked the subject. In many ways, the challenges I grapple with around religion were ones that were issues for me...

“There are no atheists in a foxhole,” Noah Weinberg used to love to say, swiftly eradicating all actual atheists who undoubtedly have existed in foxholes. That statement further disregards all the individuals who became atheists in foxholes, like the blaspheming Rabbi in Elie Wiesel’s Night. From the moment I...

Judaism teaches that our interpersonal relationships are just a key to relating to God, especially our romantic ones. So, capitalizing on the bestselling book that opened people’s eyes to the fact that not all people are exactly the same, here’s our appropriation of this pop psychology masterpiece. The first...

The worship of Israel as a state, especially by Jews abroad, is a recent invention. Not even after its founding in 1948, was this the popular sentiment. Only after 1967 did this become the mainstream, a way for Jews to express their Judaism even if they didn’t believe in...