Every week on The Wisdom Daily, we bring you our favorite reads from sources around the web. Topics on this week’s list include a new report from Pew Research on government (dis)trust, a solution for economic stagnation that will likely never be tried, a first for Saudi women, an artisanal approach to funerals and more.?Whatever’s transpiring in your life, may you find the words of wisdom you need. 1. Untrustworthy “Currently, just 19% say they can trust the government always or most of the time, among the lowest levels in the......
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News & Politics, Wisdom Warehouse |
August 18, 2015
Reading President Obama and the Iran Deal, From the Bottom Up
Whether you support President Obama and the deal with Iran, oppose it, are genuinely uncertain about where you stand, or even if you are just plain tired of the ongoing debate about it, I have an article for you. Former Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, and long-time communal leader Alan Solow, a friend, counselor and board member of Clal, publisher of The Wisdom Daily, wrote an opinion piece for JTA, which is worth the few short minutes it will take you to read. It will actually make......
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From Odyssey Networks’ Faith on the Record series: In life, we all know the ends shouldn’t justify the means. But let’s not invert that, either. In Vienna, as we pass another deadline for a nuclear deal with Iran, U.S. officials are praising their productive negotiations – with little to show for it: “The reason to successfully come to some arrangement between the various countries is not to validate the process and justify the expenditure of time; it’s to create peaceful relations between potentially warring nations.”? Watch my video for more insight and......
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Just about everything wrong with American/Western diplomacy in the Middle East in general, and with Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy in particular, is embodied by the study in this New York Times report, “Profit as an Incentive for Israeli-Palestinian Peace.” The Rand Corporation (a nonprofit that researches public policy, with clients including the World Bank and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) actually spent two years and $2 million compiling a 228-page study on the “opportunity costs” that would come with an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. Their conclusion: If an independent Palestine was to emerge tomorrow,......
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News & Politics, Wisdom Warehouse |
April 22, 2015
Israel Independence Day: Celebrating a Country Worth Loving
The celebration of Israel’s 67th birthday begins tonight and, like millions around the world, I proudly join in that celebration. Like any 67-year-old, the modern State of Israel is not perfect; it carries the bruises and scars that life inevitably brings, especially for a nation surrounded by so many others who would wish her out of existence. And for a nation which is only 67 years old – so young for a country – Israel is still very much a work in progress, and far from perfect. And yet with those imperfections,......
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News & Politics, Videos, Wisdom Warehouse |
September 09, 2014
Video: Genocide, Religious Warfare or A Third Option
From Odyssey Networks’ Faith on the Record series: Christians are increasingly at threat of ethnic cleansing throughout the Middle East and North Africa. How do we talk about that real possibility without turning this war into a religious war? Odyssey Networks tells the stories of faith in action changing the world for the better. Their stories explore a wise range of issues including peace, tolerance, social justice and the environment. To view more of Brad’s Faith on the Record discussions, please click here....
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I recently wrote about Palestinian professor Mohammed Dajani’s visit to Auschwitz with 27 of his students. On Holocaust Memorial Day 2014, Dajani spoke on “Breaking Holocaust Taboos in Palestinian Society” with some 100 faculty and students of Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School. In his speech, he described how his feelings and ideas evolved from the day when a member of his family received medical treatment at Hadassah Hospital, not as an Arab but simply as a patient and human being. Dajani is the founder and director of Wasatiya, a movement to study and......
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News & Politics, Wisdom Warehouse |
April 29, 2014
Imagining the Other Side – Learning from a Palestinian Field Trip to Auschwitz
Whatever political views we have on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is pretty clear that conventional diplomacy has resulted in all process and little peace. And whatever the desire for peace on either side, for a variety of ideological, political, cultural, historical, and theological reasons, the psychic reward and security that comes from maintaining and “managing” the conflict is for just about everyone greater than the imagined rewards for peace. Perhaps we are at a point where there is so much trauma and such deep mistrust that more than the combatants are creating......
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Here’s one of the wisest books I’ve read in a very long time: Like Dreamers – The Story of the Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation by Yossi Klein Halevi. Wise because it combines sharp analysis of Israelis’ continual wrestling with one another over what the nation is all about with a deep compassion for all of the players in the region’s ongoing conflict. Notably that includes those who have differing opinions – particularly, on the Israeli side, those who are ardently anti-Zionist. If you care about Israel, Palestine or......
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