More in ‘Tisha B’Av’

Israeli society, alas, is a mosaic made of small conflicts. There’s the unease between eastern Jews and western Jews, for example, or the tension between ancient tradition and modern culture. All of these conflicts, however, manifest themselves in one mundane thing—a simple cup of coffee.

In Tablet Magazine today, Elissa Strauss celebrates the rich Yiddish lexicon for describing female genitalia. We present part 3 of Douglas Century’s epic report on the current state of Israeli organized crime (part 1; part 2). Apropos Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s attempts to argue that the Palestinian Grand Mufti’s alliance with Hitler during World ...

We should’ve known this day was no good when, on it, Moses’s spies came from the Promised Land with reports of a terrible place littered with walled fortresses and roamed by angry giants. Moses ordered his doubting emissaries killed, but the curse of Tisha B’av lived on: the First Temple was destroyed on this day in 586 BCE. The Second Temple suffered the same fate exactly 656 years later, in 70 CE. Sixty-five years after that, in 135 CE, the Bar Kokhba revolt failed, its leader was killed, and its flagship city, Betar, was destroyed. Then, one year later, Jerusalem itself was burned, the Temple area plowed, and the fate of the Jews sealed for millennia. As if further insult was needed, in 1492, King Ferdinand of Spain signed the Alhambra Decree, setting Tisha B’Av as the deadline for all of Spain’s Jews to leave for good.