Weekly Highlights: Yossi Klein Halevi: The desecration of Israel * Religious-Zionism is dead * Kahanist merger not as bad as you think * The disastrous politics of rage

[The Blogs]( [The Marketplace of Ideas]( Weekly Highlights Thursday, February 28, 2019 [The desecration of Israel]( By [Yossi Klein Halevi]( [In boosting Otzma Yehudit, Netanyahu has validated Kahanism, an apocalyptic racist theology that sanctifies hatred and vengeance]( [Benjamin Lau]( [To my community I say this is a terrible stain]( [I spent this past Saturday night, from the moment that reports about my Shabbat sermon surfaced in the online news until the early hours of the morning, fending off the media. The program researchers and news anchors seemed to be taking delight in the fact that an Orthodox rabbi in Israel had broadsided the Jewish Home party (Bayit Yehudi) for adding Otzma Yehudit to its ranks, gleefully – and inaccurately – reporting that I had said “a vote for Bayit Yehudi is a vote for Nazism.” But I did not...]( [Zev Farber]( [Smotrich for education minister – and 4 other jokes]( [Appointing a self-described ’proud homophobe’ for the post would be hilarious if Netanyahu hadn’t actually proposed it]( [Shayna Abramson]( [Religious-Zionism is dead]( [A platform to oppress Palestinians is a violation of Judaism, and putting it on the ballot means our attempt at a Jewish state has failed]( [Shlomo Brody]( [That Kahanist merger is very bad, but not as bad as you think]( [Religious-Zionists are not unified in their opinions and did not vote as a bloc even before this realpolitik alliance betrayed the values of the movement]( [Noah Siegel]( [I’m glad I got Michael Ben Ari banned from the US]( [As a US consular officer in Tel Aviv, I concluded that the Otzma leader, with his ties to a terrorist group, was a danger]( [The gender revolution in Israel that wasn’t]( By [Elana Sztokman]( [My great hope for the kind of real-world leadership this country needs fizzled with the return of the generals and their expertise at war]( [Joshua Berman]( [Blacks, Palestinians and the disastrous politics of rage]( [African American conservatives have a message worth heeding on the corrosive effects of playing the victim card]( [Ben-Tzion Spitz]( [Israel is responsible for the Chief Rabbi of Argentina]( [The brutal attack on Rabbi Davidovich highlights Israel’s obligation to provide security to Jewish communities worldwide]( [Justin Amler]( [To soar among the heavens]( [I look at my people, where they have been, and yet what they achieve, and I am convinced that the era of miracles continues unabated]( [Jonah Rubin]( [No one thinks cadavers should receive medical care]( [Defining brain death as certain biological death is not simple, and the law takes that into account]( [Stephen Horenstein]( [7 faces of Jerusalem]( [These portraits in sound capture the hours of a day in the city, from the muezzin to birdsong to the explosion of traffic]( [David Sedley]( [James Bruce and the Ark]( [The Ark came in handy for our idol worshipping ancestors, but as the need waned, the plan was always for it to vanish (VAYAKHEL)]( [Rebecca Bardach]( [My complicated Jewish-Arab ’hood of Abu Tor]( [Is it coexistence when even my 8-year-old can see that ’the city doesn’t care about the people’ who live over there?]( [My mother escaped a Nazi boxcar]( By [Edwin Black]( [The first sounds my granddaughter heard were not from Sesame Street, but the very sounds the Nazis worked so hard to extinguish]( more Choice voices [Joshua S. Finkelstein]( [What I learned when my wife wanted to say Kaddish]( [We found an afternoon minyan in Orthodox Monsey NY where goodwill overcame our marked differences]( [Yoni Leviatan]( [Israel is a centrist country]( [Combine deep socialist roots with grave security concerns and you get citizens who buck the usual left-right divide]( [Lisa Liel]( [To Bibi and the Likud: Please sit this one out]( [Our best bet to keep Gantz and Lapid out of power is by letting the fresh approach of Moshe Feiglin’s Zehut Party take its turn]( [Dan Perry]( [The Labor Party may have handed Bibi the election]( [Avi Gabbay’s refusal to merge with Meretz means thousands of votes for the left could potentially go down the drain]( [Unsubscribe from this List]( © 2019 THE TIMES OF ISRAEL, All Rights Reserved