In his biting poem “Pink Eyeglasses,” the great Hebrew poet Natan Alterman wrote of the power of illusion to distort even the most honest analysis: “The lens gives the color and the heart follows.” During the Ten Days of Repentance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, all of us—and especially our leaders—need to look through
What a week it was! For the first time in Israel’s history a former prime minister was indicted. Two former ministers began serving prison sentences. And the trial of former president Moshe Katzav finally began. Who can blame the Israeli media for paying most of their attention to the visit of pop megastar Madonna?Israeli newspapers
Dr. Moshe Itzhaki, an old friend, is a soft-spoken former kibbutznik, a farmer and paratrooper who began his university studies in his thirties and is today a respected professor of Hebrew literature. Moisheleh, as he is universally known, is also a poet who makes the Hebrew language sing—lyrically, boisterously, with a delicious earthy complexity that
