“When I do feel that I’m right, I’m not much bothered by criticism,” she added. “Who has ever stood up against injustice without being criticized? If that’s all I have to endure, then it’s very little.”
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On one foot: Five essential things to know about Abraham Joshua Heschel on his 50th yahrzeit
(JTA) — Last week marked the 50th yahrzeit — or Hebrew anniversary — of the death of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972), the theologian, scholar, philosopher, Holocaust survivor and modern-day prophet who was long associated with the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary but whose embrace of “radical amazement” wasn’t contained by any movement or denomination. Monday is also Martin Luther King Jr. Day: The rabbi and the minister have often been linked thanks to Heschel’s civil rights activism and iconic photographs of them in the front lines of the march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery on March 21, 1965. (See below for events tied to the legacies of both men.)
I confess that Heschel’s lavish, epigrammatic prose and devotion to the living reality of God didn’t speak to a buttoned-down skeptic like me. I might quote his book “The Sabbath,” a lovely articulation of how Shabbat forms an island in time, but I’m more comfortable discussing Heschel’s political views, like his opposition to the Vietnam War, than his ideas on God and humankind.
I suspect others are similarly intimidated by Heschel, and could use a gentle onramp. For help I turned to Rabbi Shai Held, author of “Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence” (2015) and the president and dean at Hadar, the nondenominational yeshiva. I challenged Held to name five works, articles, films or other media that would help people appreciate who Heschel was and why he remains celebrated.
“I fell in love with Heschel as as a teenager, because I felt he both articulated intuitions about the world that I had but didn’t remotely have language for, and he also was the first person I had heard articulate a vision of what Judaism thought that the good life could look like,” Held told me. “As a day school grad I felt I knew a lot of stuff about Judaism, but if you asked me ‘what is Judaism about and what is it for,’ I would have had no idea what to say. And Heschel gave me that narrative. It was a story that spoke to my mind and my heart at the same time. It was like asking me to become something in the world and that was incredibly moving to me.”
Here are five great ways to access Heschel, with comments by Rabbi Held. I plan to make this an ongoing series of introductions to Jewish thinkers, writers and artists who are making news or are particularly relevant to the current Jewish conversation. If there is someone you’d like to see discussed, drop me a line at asc@jewishweek.org.
(For Rabbi Held’s own introduction to Heschel, see his video, “Why Amazement Matters.”)
“The Sabbath,” (1951)
(In this slim volume, Heschel describes the Sabbath as a “palace in time,” and an opportunity for spiritual communion with the potential to help shape how its observers live the other six days of the week.)
“The number of people I have met in my travels, who tell me about how that book opened them up to spirituality, is staggering. Two things about that book are very moving. One is, at a time when American Judaism was about integration and success, Heschel launched this dramatic insistence that Judaism was about the life of the spirit. I think it landed like a bomb for a lot of American Jews. It was totally revolutionary to them. One of the ways that the book has resonated and continues to resonate is that Heschel is rebelling against a culture of technology, and wants to place a stake in the ground for the value of appreciation and gratitude. One of my favorite sentences in all of Heschel is that ‘Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation.’ That line is from ‘God in Search of Man,’ but I think ‘The Sabbath’ is about Shabbat as a practice of appreciation.
“I also think that people had internalized the Christian, anti-Jewish idea that Christianity was about inwardness and spirituality and Judaism wasn’t. Heschel responds: We gave the world the gift of Sabbath which is about living in the presence of God.”
“God in Search of Man,” part 1 (1955)
(Held calls Heschel’s companion volume to his earlier work “Man Is Not Alone” a “beautiful evocation of what wonder and gratitude look like.”)
“This is Heschel as a phenomenologist: What is it like to have a sense that our lives are not something that we earned and that part of the religious life is to repay this extraordinary gift? He needs to write in a poetic mode, in part, because he’s trying to evoke in his readers a sense of gratitude, a sense of indebtedness, a sense of obligation. What I tried to do in my book is to [delete] sort of argue that amidst all that poetry, there’s an argument: Wonder is what opens the door to obligation. Wonder is about reawakening a sense that all of us, just by the nature of being human, have an intuition that we’re obligated to something and someone.”
“The Prophets,” 1962
(Heschel provides compact profiles of seven biblical prophets and attempts to understand the phenomenon of prophecy in general. Held recommends starting with the chapter titled, “The Theology of Pathos.”)
“Heschel makes the most eloquent case I think any Jew has ever made since the prophets for a God who cares, a God who is stirred to the core of God’s being by human suffering and especially human suffering that stems from oppression. It’s Heschel’s attempt to reclaim the God of the Bible from what he saw as the ravages of abstract philosophy that reduces God to an idea. God is not an idea. God is someone who cares about us. God has a name. There’s this amazing speech he gives to Jewish educators somewhere where he says, ‘I was invited to a conference to talk about my idea of God and I responded to them and said, ‘I don’t have an idea of God, I have God’ — Hakadosh baruch hu [the Holy one, blessed be God] who makes a claim on my life.”
“Religion and Race,” 1963
(On Jan. 14, 1963, Heschel gave the speech “Religion and Race” at a conference of the same name in Chicago, where he became close to King.)
“First of all, you see how Heschel’s theology and his activism are so entirely interwoven: The God who loves the downtrodden, the God who loves widows and orphans, is the God who requires us to stand up and fight for civil rights. It’s also extraordinarily beautiful, in that it combines really interesting biblical interpretation with [theological depth and profound] moral passion. Part of what Heschel and King meant to each other is that each one of them saw the other as a kind of living proof that God had not abandoned the downtrodden — and King was very important to Heschel in the context of the theology of of the Shoah: Martin Luther King embodies the reality that God has not abandoned the world. He really believed Martin Luther King was channeling God, nothing less than that.”
The NBC Interview (1972)
(Shortly before he died at age 65, Heschel recorded an interview with broadcaster Carl Stern. It aired on Dec. 10, 1972, on NBC-TV as an episode of “The Eternal Light,” the long-running religion and ethics show produced in conjunction with the Jewish Theological Seminary.)
“He makes this incredibly beautiful statement about telling kids to live their life as if it were a work of art. Which is just amazing — so beautiful and so simple. And there’s also this really interesting moment where Carl Stern asks him if he’s a prophet and he says, ‘You know, I cannot accept such a compliment. I am not a prophet. I am a child of prophets. But indeed the Talmud says all Israel are the children of prophets.’ I just love that combination of humility and elevatedness. That interview [offers a powerful glimpse of him as a human being, and not just a bunch of words on a page. You see a real person]. is also what makes him actually a human being and not just a bunch of words on a page. You see a real person.”
On Monday, Jan. 16 at 7 p.m. ET, Shai Held will join Arnold Eisen, chancellor emeritus of the Jewish Theological Seminary, for a Martin Luther King Jr. Day conversation reflecting on Heschel’s life, thought and legacy. (Register here for Zoom link.) That same night, at 8 p.m. ET, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah will commemorate Heschel’s 50th yahrzeit with a discussion with his daughter, Susannah Heschel, the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. (Register here.)
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The post On one foot: Five essential things to know about Abraham Joshua Heschel on his 50th yahrzeit appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Sally Rooney to Publish Hebrew Translation of Latest Book With Pro-BDS Israeli Publisher
Author Sally Rooney in an interview with “PBS NewsHour.” Photo: Screenshot.
Award-winning Irish author Sally Rooney will publish a Hebrew translation of her latest novel, Intermezzo, through an independent Israeli publishing house that supports the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, it was announced on Tuesday.
According to its website, November Books aims to “promote the full realization of human rights … and in particular for Palestinians living under all forms of Israeli oppression including the military occupation.” The Israeli publishing house said it is also “committed to the idea, in line with Palestinian and democratic voices in Israel, that Israel should not be a Jewish state but rather a state of all its citizens and recognize the right of return as it was accepted by the UN. We strongly oppose any form of inequality and apartheid.”
November Books will publish the Hebrew translation of Intermezzo in collaboration with +972 Magazine and Local Call, two independent Israeli news outlets. Translated by Debbie Eylon and edited by Asaf Schurr, it will be published in June “in a way that honors the principles of the boycott and stands in solidarity with the Palestinian demand for freedom, equality, and justice,” +972 Magazine executive director Haggai Matar wrote on Tuesday in an op-ed announcing the news. The novel, published in 2024, focuses on two brothers following the death of their father, and it explores themes of grief, love, and family.
In 2021, Rooney announced she would only allow her third book, Beautiful World, Where Are You, to be translated to Hebrew through a publishing house that complies with the BDS movement’s “institutional boycott guidelines” against Israel. The 35-year-old author said she does not want to partner with an Israeli company “that does not publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people.”
At the time, Rooney had already published Hebrew translations of two of her novels — 2017’s Conversations With Friends and 2018’s Normal People – with the Israeli publishing house Modan, but refused to let them translate Beautiful World, Where Are You.
BDS seeks to isolate Israel from the international community as a step toward its eventual elimination. Leaders of the movement have repeatedly stated their goal is to destroy the world’s only Jewish state.
Rooney spoke this week to The Guardian and attempted to explain her position.
“For me, the act of translation is in itself a beautiful ideal,” she said. “Though my refusal to work with complicit Israeli publishing houses made the contractual side of things more complex, I was, of course, never boycotting the Hebrew language or any language.”
Last year, Rooney said she would give proceeds from her books and BBC adaptations of them to support Palestine Action, an anti-Israel group designated as a terrorist organization in the United Kingdom.
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For Israel, the Accusation Itself Becomes Proof
People attend the annual al-Quds Day (Jerusalem Day) rally in London, Britain, March 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jaimi Joy
A dangerous shift happens when people stop feeling responsible for verifying what they believe. The accusation itself becomes enough. Once institutions repeat something with enough confidence, many decent people hand over their judgment completely. They assume somebody else has already checked the facts.
That is where real danger begins.
A case is being built against Israel in international courts, and much of the public discussion around it already feels emotionally settled long before most people have examined a single document, testimony, or legal standard for themselves.
The International Court of Justice has no meaningful conflict-of-interest mechanism comparable to what people would expect in many domestic legal systems. UN reports and secondary claims enter public discourse carrying the weight of institutional authority, even when the underlying sources were never cross-examined or independently verified in a courtroom setting.
At a certain point, the accusation itself becomes proof.
That pattern extends far beyond a courtroom. Perception gets taken over before a person realizes his or her thinking has been outsourced. Repetition creates familiarity. Familiarity creates emotional certainty. Eventually people stop asking where the information came from in the first place.
Jewish history carries enough experience with this pattern to recognize it early. A claim repeated often enough starts feeling like an established truth even before evidence exists to support it.
Once institutions absorb the accusation, the public no longer experiences skepticism as responsibility. Skepticism starts feeling like disobedience.
Artificial intelligence is about to accelerate this problem even further. AI systems absorb dominant narratives faster than human beings can examine them critically. Once a version of events becomes widely indexed, cited, repeated, and emotionally reinforced, it enters the system as background truth. The next generation encounters conclusions first and context later.
That matters because most people do not independently investigate history, legal claims, or war. They inherit understanding socially. Search engines shape it. Institutions shape it. Algorithms shape it. Repetition shapes it.
The responsibility for your own safety begins before the threat fully arrives. Physical self-defense taught me that years ago. Cognitive self-defense follows the same principle. A society that loses the ability to question emotionally satisfying accusations becomes vulnerable to manipulation at a scale far larger than any courtroom.
People once understood that serious accusations required serious proof. Today, institutional confidence often replaces evidence in the public mind. That shift should concern anyone who still believes good intentions alone are enough to protect people from participating in injustice.
Tsahi Shemesh is an Israeli-American IDF veteran and the founder of Krav Maga Experts in NYC. A father and educator, he writes about Jewish identity, resilience, moral courage, and the ethics of strength in a time of rising antisemitism.
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Fatah Turned 388 Terrorists Into Its Leaders at Its 8th General Conference
A meeting of the Fatah Revolutionary Council at the Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar in the West Bank, July 12, 2018. Photo: Reuters / Mohamad Torokman.
The Eighth Fatah Conference continued to glorify past Palestinian terrorist murderers while building the next generation of terrorist leadership.
PA and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas decided that all prisoners who were incarcerated for more than 20 years — meaning those who were guilty of murder or attempted murder — automatically would become part of the Palestinian leadership and thus were able to participate and vote at the conference, which took place this past weekend.
The consequence of this is that a total of 388 Palestinians, who as prisoners were presented as role models, just transitioned into becoming PA leaders.
A senior Fatah youth leader described the importance: “We have a great opportunity as Fatah youth … to learn from them.”
Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) has shown repeatedly exactly how the PA and Fatah, as policy, portray murderers of Jews as role models for all Palestinians, and especially youth:
Official PA TV newsreader: “The prisoners [i.e., terrorists] will also have prominent representation in the [Eighth Fatah] Conference, there will be participation of more than 388 prisoners who have served more than 20 years in the occupation’s [i.e., Israeli] prisons…”
Fatah Shabiba Youth Movement Secretariat member Tasami Ramadan: “The participation of the [released] prisoners this time in this conference… is a very qualitative addition... seeing this qualitative and special addition that our released prisoners will contribute, as they are not just released prisoners and we cannot summarize them only as such.
They are also [figures] of national stature and national pillars who have outlined the characteristics of Fatah’s path, and they are also spiritual and organizational pillars. We have a great opportunity as Fatah youth … to learn from them and to be their partners in building Fatah’s political decision.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV News, May 8, 2026]
A Fatah spokesman further legitimized the participation of released terrorists in Fatah’s leadership conference as they “precede everything” and are held “in highest regard:”
Fatah Spokesman and Eighth Fatah Conference preparatory committee member Iyad Abu Zneit: “The composition of the [Eighth Fatah] Conference is diverse and rich … Of course, the released prisoners [are also represented], as they precede everything.
I will emphasize that the leadership insisted on there being broad representation for the [released] prisoners at this conference… The group of prisoners that these ones represent from among those in the Fatah Movement also constitutes a significant number [of members], a large number, who have their own role, and we hold them in the highest regard. They have the right to be partners in Fatah, in the [Fatah] Revolutionary Council, in the leadership of the [Fatah] Central Committee, and in any place they can reach.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV, Topic of the Day, May 6, 2026]
PMW exposed last week that among the Fatah members at the Eighth General Conference and those running for Fatah leadership positions are released prisoners responsible for the murder of 75 people while some of the most venerated figures at the conference included arch-terrorist murderers Abu Iyad, who planned the Munich Olympics massacre, and Abu Jihad, who was responsible for the murder of 125 people.
The author is the Founder and Director of Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article first appeared.