Ayelet Glaser was a student at Columbia University on October 7, 2023. Her experiences during the days that followed led directly to her “Aliyah” – her immigration to Israel, where she lives today. Here she shares some of what she saw, heard and felt during that life-changing period.
The Questionable (and Immortal) Values in the Books of Roald Dahl
He saw the world as a dark and terrible place. He thought Hitler wasn’t entirely wrong. His books brim with gruesome imagery, and with scorn for women, overweight people and different races. And yet, decades after they were written, they remain bestsellers, fueling blockbuster Broadway productions and prompting Netflix to pay hundreds of millions for the rights. Who was Roald Dahl, and what is the secret of his stories’ enduring appeal?
Leo Frank, 1915: The Case America Still Reckons With
More than a century after the lynching of a Jewish-American man in Georgia, rising antisemitism makes the tragedy’s warning painfully clear.
How Did Queen Esther Become a Christian Saint?
They fled from Spain to neighboring Portugal but were soon forced to cross the Atlantic on their way to the New World. They were baptized as Christians against their will and were forced to remove any signs that hinted at their Jewish heritage. But they were willing to risk their lives to hold on to something. This is the story of the conversos who invented a Christian saint who was in fact a Jewish queen, to remind themselves of who they truly were.
Yavnieli and the Yemenite Aliyah
With the birth of the State of Israel, over 850,000 Jews were forced to leave the Arab and Islamic world. In Yemen, however, this was not the first time a mass immigration to Israel had taken place. More than three decades earlier, with the help of a young man named Shmuel Yavnieli, over 1,500 Yemenite Jews started their own journey to the Land of Israel, and embarked on a voyage largely untold…
Flogging as Atonement? An Often-Overlooked Yom Kippur Custom
How a little-known Yom Kippur ritual became a weapon in the hands of antisemites
Austria’s Dreyfus? The Story of Philippe Halsman, the Man Who Didn’t Murder His Father
Philippe Halsman took some of the most famous photos in the world – hundreds of images of iconic celebrities and pictures adorning the cover of Life magazine and museum walls. But before all this, Halsman was tried in Austria for the unimaginable crime of murdering his own father. Was he truly a cold-blooded killer, or was he an Austrian Dreyfus, persecuted solely for being Jewish?
The Many Lives of the Synagogue El Transito
When Samuel Ha-Levi illegally built a synagogue in the provincial Spanish town of Toledo, no one could have known that it would one day become a church, then a military barracks in the Napoleonic war, a national monument, and finally a museum… but that’s just the beginning!
The Pope and Haman in Renaissance Italy
The only known manuscript of The Chronicle of Pope Paul IV is at the National Library in Jerusalem…
The Man Who Tried to Redefine Ukrainian Jewish History
For Ilya Galant, the myths of eternal hatred between Ukrainians and Jews were just that, myths
