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Hartman Scholars, Fellows and Programs in the News
  
Yom Kippur 5771 (Yehuda Kurtzer, American Jewish World Service, September 2010)
Shalom Hartman Institute North America President, Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer, offers an essay on Yom Kippur, and how the language of the high priest from the days of the Temple still "gives us language of clarity and purpose, a local language of global responsibility, reminding us that our experience of the particular is the lens we need to understand the universal." The full article is now available on the Hartman Institute website. Click here to read, "Yom Kippur 5771."
In recent weeks, in discussions with friends in the American Jewish community about your initiative to build a mosque and Muslim community center near Ground Zero, I’ve found myself repeatedly defending your integrity as an interfaith partner. If you are not a worthy dialogue partner for the Jewish community, then there is almost no one in Islam with whom we can speak.
Click here to read more from this article. However, the entire article is available only to New Republic subscribers.
...many Bnei Akiva graduates...have misgivings about sending their own children. Some are high-profile figures, such as the modern Orthodox rabbi Donniel Hartman, whose children, the eldest of whom has just left high school, left the movement of his youth to join a religious chapter of the Israeli Scouts.
Rabbi Hartman, president of the Jerusalem-based Hartman Institute, said that Bnei Akiva was gradually turning its back on a modern Orthodox ideal of fusing secular and religious culture, in favour of a Charedi ideal of rejecting modernity.
"The easiest issues which one can use to lever a separation from modernity are dress and gender segregation - they are basically mechitzot (separation barriers) between them and the outside, while the movement was meant to be a bridge between secular and religious culture," he said.
Shalom Hartman Institute Fellow and Engaging Israel Panel member Yossi Klein Halevi was one of the contributors to The New York Times feature, "Room for Debate," which "invites knowledgeable outside contributors to discuss news events and other timely issues." The topic on September 1, 2010, the eve of the Washington-based peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, was: "Negotiating With the Israeli Settlers: Will Netanyahu or the Israeli government ever be able to bring the settler movement on board in any peace process?"
Tuesday’s terror attack which left four settlers dead is a reminder of the difference in tone between the Likud-led government today and the Labor-led governments of the 1990s. “You, my brothers, are pioneers,” Ruby Rivlin, the Likud leader and speaker of the Knesset, told settlers at the funeral procession. That wasn’t mere rhetoric. For the Likud, the settlers are an extension of itself.
That emotional connection could become a strategic advantage for the Likud, if peace talks turn serious.
…It is far easier for a Likud government to win majority support for withdrawal than it is for a left-wing government….If there is a serious Palestinian offer for peace, then only Likud will be able to deliver a majority of the Israeli public and thereby neutralize effective settler opposition.
Click here to read all of Yossi's comments and those of the forum's other participants, including David Newman, Ben-Gurion University, Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University, and others.
Philanthropist Edgar M. Bronfman, in the final part of a five-part series of articles, talks about the need to rethink and update the relationship between Israel and the world's Jews, and quotes Hartman Institute Founding President David Hartman on the subject:
As my dear friend, the philosopher David Hartman once said to me, "Israel is a return to the particular, but not a ghetto.... It's not meant to be insulated from the world. It lives in discussion with the world." Yes, Israel has very real problems being accepted in its immediate neighborhood and by some in the international arena. And yes, these problems on the whole are not of its own making. But Israel should always be engaged in this wider "discussion with the world," and turn away from the "ghetto" mentality."
Donniel Hartman Quoted Extensively After Conversion Controversy Article
Donniel was quoted in an article by The New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner on the subject:
“There is increasing discomfort among American Jews with Israel,” commented Rabbi Donniel Hartman, president of Jerusalem’s Shalom Hartman Institute, which is devoted to exploring Jewish issues. “This issue is a place where they can express the displeasure that they might not be willing to state on the flotilla and other political matters.”
For that reason, some here, even among those sympathetic to the Reform and Conservative movements, like Rabbi Hartman, feel that the American reaction to the Rotem bill was overly aggressive.
“They overstated this one,” he said.
In an editorial taking a contrarian view of the conversion bill uproar, the Forward excerpted Donniel's most recent commentary:
Rabbi Donniel Hartman of the Shalom Hartman Institute, one of the saner voices during this emotional dispute, put it best: “It requires a commitment to Israel not as it is, but as it ought to be, and a willingness to invest in creating such an Israel.” And, he wrote recently, “it requires a deep caring.”
To care deeply doesn’t obligate us to swear blind loyalty and suppress disagreement. But it doesn’t allow us to turn our backs, either. With all the worried talk about the demise of “liberal Zionism,” here is a chance for Jews in Israel and the Diaspora to resurrect its future.
The Jerusalem Post reprinted the original commentary by Donniel Hartman, which ran first on the Institute's website.
A version in Hebrew was published on Ynet, the leading news website in Israel, on 25/07/2010. Click here for the Hebrew version.
The Israeli Conversion Bill: What it means and why everyone’s so mad (Los Angeles Jewish Journal - 20/07/2010)
Dr. Ariel Picard, Educational Director of the Hartman Institute's Be'eri program of Judaic enrichment studies for secular Israeli high schools, is quoted in an article on the so-called "Rotem Conversion Bill," which would permit current and former municipal rabbis and rabbis of local councils could set up their own special rabbinical courts under certain circumstances.
Picard is quoted as saying that even if the bill passes — and he didn’t expect it would — more laws would need to be legislated.
Emily Soloff, Associate Director for Interreligious and Intergroup Relations for the American Jewish Committee, writes in the Chicago Tribune about her participation in the 2009 Christian Leadership Initiative, a program for Christian clerics and academics designed to teach them about Judaism in traditional Jewish fashion in an article about a proposed multifaith seminary in Chicago:
"Last summer I studied with a president, deans, and professors from seven different Christian theological schools at a Jewish institution of higher learning in Israel. All of us were participants in the Christian Leadership Initiative co-sponsored by the American Jewish Committee and the Shalom Hartman Institute.
"For 10 days, four Jews and 11 serious, devout, thoughtful Christian educators wrestled with Hebrew text and commentary in hevruta - a traditional style of Jewish learning where students examine text with a critical eye, an inquiring mind and a partner. In hevruta, the exchange of ideas and dialogue among peers makes everyone both teacher and student."
Haaretz commentator Avirama Golan cites two Hartman Institute scholars, Avi Sagi and Zvi Zohar, as well as Asher Cohen, author of Non-Jewish Jews in Israel, a book published by the Institute, on the actual processes of "social conversion" for non-Jewish members of Jewish families and halakhically non-Jewish Israelis under way that run counter to, irrespective of and alongside the ongoing political disputes in Israel over rabbinic and official conversion.
The other Israeli conflict: with itself (Christian Science Monitor - 09/07/2010)
Hartman Fellow Yossi Klein Halevi is quoted in this Christian Science Monitor article on Israel's ultra-Orthodox.
Reading With Rashi: Parashat Balak (Jewish Journal -22/06/2010)
Rabbi Laura Geller of Bevery Hills talks in a column in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles about learning how to read the Torah with Rashi's commentary from Rabbi Prof. David Hartman.
Hartman Institute Fellow Yossi Klein Halevi was quoted about why Israelis ignored global reaction to the Gaza flotilla event:
When the world confuses a jihadist lynch mob for peace activists, Israelis nod their head and say, "We recognize this as a Jewish moment," says Yossi Klein Halevi, a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jewish research and education facility in Jerusalem.
"Almost every Israeli, regardless of the way they feel about the operation, knows that this [flotilla raid] is not a moral failing of Israel," says Mr. Klein Halevi. "And yet Israelis see the world entering a spasm of moral outrage that we don't see being expressed over Darfur." He adds that Israelis angrily reject world opinion as inherently biased.
In the article's closing, Klein Halevi said the 1990s, after the Oslo accords, was a period in which Israel was willing to take risks for peace and that Israel does care about global approval:
"This idea either that we don't care about being pariahs or we revel in it is a misreading of the Israeli psyche… it goes against a key Zionist motif which is restoring the Jewish people to the community of nations," he says.
However, he said that when Israelis "sense they are being unfairly judged, and being held to a standard no country is being held to" they "freeze up."
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