Jew vs. Jew, or the Festival of Fights: Gordon Haber on the Secret Contentious History of Hanukkah

There are a lot of different ways of thinking about Hanukkah, but we tend to forget that the holiday is very much about intra-Jewish conflict. The Festival of Lights, as you know, commemorates the restoration of the Temple in 164 BCE. After kicking out the Seleucids — whom we might call today “culturally Greek Syrians”

DRUNK and STUFFED

Happy Thanksgiving from LABA, the international incubator of Jewish arts and culture! Today, on the American holiday dedicated to fressing (aka gluttony), we’d like to share some words of wisdom about stuffing yourself. You may know that the great Moses Ben Maimon, or Maimonides, was renowned both as a rabbi and a doctor, and his

LABA-BA’s Tova Shvartzman on OTHERNESS

SHIBBOLET Tova Shvartzman for LABA Journal At this very moment I have a concrete experience of the Other. This current Other is the English language. It is not a friendly Other like a neighbor. It is an alien Other. I need to express myself in this foreign tongue to establish connections between creativity and work with you all here today. In

The Evasive OTHER

LABA Journal’s Editor Hanan Elstein: Should We Discuss OTHER? OTHER is a highly explosive theme, especially beyond its limited political scope and current obvious relevance. The notion of the Other, be it phenomenological, existential or psychological, is inherently elusive and resists a single coherent definition. Thinkers as well as artists, in fact human beings by

Seven Raiments of Captivity

A modest offering for a woman who had just lost everything. BY LITAL DOTAN A profoundly disturbing LABA session discussing the behavioral rules in a state of war and battle, specifically behavior with captive women, instigated my interrogation into the route of the captive towards her new identity. A WOMAN OF A GOODLY FORM is she who is