- Boston real estate blog – 2008-2009 Boston Parking Space Sales Statistics.
- Jewish Exponent – Jewish Community is Graying But Where Are the Kids?
- Times – World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown.
- TNR – Our Bauhaus.
- Philip Greenspun: Architecture schools should provide counter-cyclical second career training.
- Alan Brill – The Bahir, The Shepherd of Hermas, and Kabbalah.
- God didn’t say that – Translation Challenge: Isaiah 28:16.
- Guardian – Lawyer [Rodrigo Rosenberg] in YouTube murder plot video hired his own assassins – UN.
- Aish.com – Interview with Scott Rothstein’s whistleblower Alan Sakowitz.
- Roger Ebert – I read just about every word in these during my bedazzed youth. Now it’s the covers I love.
Posts tagged as:
links
- Randy Crawford and the Crusaders – Imagine – “Auditorium Stravinsky”, Montreux, Switzerland, July 18th, 2003 – YouTube (she said “the war is over” then, hmm).
- bibleplaces.com – Top 9 Archeological Discoveries of 2009.
- virtualphilosopher.com – Slavoj Zizek on What Philosophy Is.
- Ricecracker – Blizzard 2009 – Snowball fight Times Square.
- Anil Dash - Life on the Twitter “Suggested User List”.
- Mya Guarnieri – Arabic slang is sababa in Hebrew.
- WSJ – U.S. should legalize marijuana, let cocaine pass through the Caribbean and take the profit motive out of the drug trade.
- Bloomberg – Leviev Mired in New York Property.
- Wikipedia – Robert Brasillach.
- Neuroskeptic – The War on “Interesting”.
- Chris Dixon – Why the web economy will continue growing rapidly.
Concise and complete post on Hasmonean history by Prof. Lawrence H. Schiffman – The Hasmonean Dynasty:
- 152 B.C.E. Jonathan the Hasmonean becomes the ruler.
- 143 B.C.E. Jonathan the Hasmonean murdered by Tryphon, a pretender to the Seleucid throne.
- 142 B.C.E. Simon the brother of Jonathan becomes the ruler.
- 140 B.C.E. The Hasmnonean Kings are now also High Priests.
- 134 B.C.E Simon and his two sons murdered by his son-in-law with the help of Seleucids. Surviving son Yohanan Hyrkanus becomes the King and High Priest.
- 104 B.C.E. Yohanan Hyrkanus dies and another Simon’s son Aristobulus ascends to the throne.
- 104 B.C.E Aristobulus ruled only for one year by he managed to treat his mother with the utmost cruelty, imprison three of his brothers, and kill his another brother, Antigonus.
- 103 B.C.E Alexander Yannai comes to power when he married Aristobulus’ widow, Salome Alexandra (Shelomzion). We are holding at a 50 year mark after the Chanukah at this point. And here is the rest of the story:
“The Maccabees had not fought only to free the Jews from foreign domination, or for power and wealth. They had risen initially against elements in the Jewish population who sought to Hellenize themselves and their countrymen. Their struggle was transformed into a war of independence against the Seleucid Empire only when it sought to aid the Hellenizers by persecuting Jews and Judaism. Yet gradually, the Hasmonean descendants of the Maccabees themselves acquired the trappings of Hellenism. They began to conduct their courts in Hellenistic fashion and were estranged from Jewish observance. This transition went way beyond the need of any monarch at that time to make use of Hellenistic-style coinage, diplomacy, and bureaucracy. The Hasmoneans employed foreign mercenaries to protect them from their own people.
Opposition to the Hasmonean house came from a variety of corners. First, they had never made peace with remnants of the old-line Hellenizers among the landed aristocracy. Second, the Pharisees opposed the concentration in Hasmonean hands of both temporal and religious power, demanding that the Hasmoneans relinquish the high priesthood, since they were not of the proper high priestly lineage. Third, other groups, whose point of view is represented in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, accepted the legitimacy of the Hasmoneans as high priests but condemned them for also holding political power.
All these factors had already led Alexander Janneus to prepare his wife, Salome Alexandra, for the succession and to recommend to her that she compromise with the dynasty’s opponents. This she did effectively for some nine years until her death in 67 B.C.E. Yet she failed effectively to designate her successor, and her sons, Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II, fought one another for the crown. Both eventually appealed to the Romans. By this time Rome was already in Syria and positioned to swallow up Judea. Aristobulus was remembered by later sources as a great hero, a man possessed of the spirit of the Maccabees, seeking nothing less than freedom from foreign rule. Hyrcanus was pictured as a weakling, desiring power for power’s sake, at any cost to himself and his nation. In 63 B.C.E., as the two fought with one another, each turned to the Roman general Pompey, in Syria. After a series of negotiations, Pompey decided to capitalize on the situation by satisfying the longstanding Roman desire to dominate Palestine, the strategic land bridge between Africa and Asia. He played the brothers off against each other for a time, then marched on Jerusalem and took it by storm.
Thus ended the Hasmonean dynasty. The Romans were now the country’s real rulers. They awarded the high priesthood to Hyrcanus II and imprisoned Aristobulus II. He and his sons would for years show themselves to be true Maccabean descendants, repeatedly escaping Roman imprisonment to seek against all odds to wrest Judea back from the Romans. But the Hasmonean star had set.”
Also excellent, David Brooks in the NYT – The Hanukkah Story. In passing David Brooks makes a fascinating point, the festival custom was part of the Greek culture. So much for getting rid of the Greek influences. Kudos to Brooks for highlighting the ambivalence of the story, alas even he needs to remain politically correct enough, not only he has to allude to the fact that the Hasmoneans were essentially the trailblazer for the Taliban, but he omits the sourcing of the narrative itself. And naturally the Hasmoneans invented more than the festival and the lights, they invented the spin, the narrative. So the anti Jewish atrocities that Brooks repeats are mostly sourced in the post-Hasmonean Talmud and the Apocrypha of the time. Imagine if the Taliban would win the war in Afghanistan, what would they teach in schools about the Americans? Heck you don’t even need to ask an Islamist, just ask some leftie American and you would hear that it’s all about the American torture. It gets even more complicated than Brooks would let you to imagine.
P.S. Also Interesting review of the new book by Hanan Eshel – The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Hasmonean State in the Biblical Archeology Review.
latkes via sassyradish
- Israeli Kitchen – Poussins Stuffed With Rice and Pine Nuts
- Baroness Tapuzina – Italian Soufganyiot – Frittole
- Food Bridge- Greek Meatballs
- Cooking Manager – Do You Admit To Guests That the Food Isn’t Great?
- אין מױל ארײן – Uppåkra – Swedish Potato Cookies for Passover
- Kosher Camembert – Sunday Morning any Time
via a Mother in Israel – Blogger’s Night Out in Petach Tikva
- There is an eye opening video quote from Michael Pollan on ForaTV – Building a Slow Food Nation – Introducing a ‘Sun Food Agenda’.
- On Google video there a 20 min presentation from Alain de Botton – Socrates on Self-Confidence.
- NYT – China Web Sites Seeking Users’ Names.
- YouTube – Nose Job Craze in Iran.
- Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution with his definition – What is conservatism?
- The Big Picture Photos: The Sayano-Shushenskaya dam accident.
