Yesterday in town, I struggled to find my way among new high-rises I’d never seen before. I talked to people. Most Israelis no longer care what Europe thinks of us. The younger generation, at least. In their eyes, Europe is a kind of tourist park with museums and
Yesterday, 7.8., the publisher (Edition Achgut in Berlin) and the editors (Simone Schermann in Bavaria and I in the Negev desert) completed the book about the aftermath of October 7, 2023, which will be published in Berlin on October 7, 2026. Eighteen Jewish authors (from Germany, Israel, U.S.
The following appeared yesterday in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Acheronot: “Cristiano Ronaldo’s partner and the mother of his children shared a striking video from the Spanish island of Mallorca during their family vacation, but it was the caption she added that caught everyone’s attention: ‘Healthy,’ written in Hebrew.
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Literary Transformations of a Landscape Besides the Earth’s natural deserts, there are those created by humans, and this process of fertile land becoming desertified, usually referred to by the English term desertification, is documented early in literature. Even in ancient Babylonian cuneiform texts, the ambivalence of arid regions with
In my 2020 book, "The Desert," I addressed the problem of "desertification," the process by which formerly fertile land becomes barren. At the time, this didn't fit into the one-sided, ideology-driven concept of the left-wing Greens, who believed that "climate
Last Shabbat afternoon, 30-year-old Bar Asraf shot himself at the gravestone of his girlfriend, who was killed by Hamas terrorists at the Nova Festival on October 7, 2023. Even three years later, he had not yet gotten over her loss. The wounds run deeper than we thought. We
What the German-Persian writer Navid Kermani demonstrated in his speech at the swearing-in ceremony for recruits at the Bendlerblock in Berlin—repeating the old mantra of pacifism and thereby demotivating and discouraging young German recruits even before they had to fight at all, telling them that refusing to
Surprising information in newspaper Jerusalem Post, 1st of August, 2026 : "Despite fierce rabbinic opposition, haredi (ultra-Orth0d0x) enlistment (in Israeli Army IDF) is rising. The numbers suggest changing incentives may be altering the draft calculus. According to a Yediot Aharonot report on Wednesday, at least 4,000 haredim enlisted
In the Journal du Dimanche, Dr. Gudrun Eussner, a blogger living in Perpignan and a reader of these notes, found, after some searching, information about the arsonists of the forest fires in southern France "that goes beyond the one Tunisian from CNews (...) Laurent Nuñez reported on Friday about 308
The young Berliner Abdul B., who deliberately drove a rented van into the crowd at Christopher Street Day on the evening of July 25th, injuring 29 people and killing one woman, is presented to readers of the German magazine Stern as a young man "with the heart of a
When I posted my short notice about "Queers for Israel" in the morning, I hadn’t yet looked at the German newspapers and knew nothing about the Islamic attack on participants in Berlin’s Christopher Street Day. What was intended as a showcase of tolerant, "colorful"
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(In the following text I presented my thesis on the "flexible ego of Israelis". It was written for an American Jewish magazine, below you will find a German version, published in print magazine Opus (Nr. 101, Nov. 2024). An extended German version was published on Achgut.com on