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Bits and Pieces of My Work and Interests
November 5, 2014
November 5, 2014
The King is Dead, Long Live the… Wait, is it Good for the Jews?
"Is it Good for the Jews?" is a generations-old criterion for making sense of world events. Wars, revolutions, natural disasters, something colossal has happened, at the bottom line we want to know the only thing that matters - is it, or is it not? For the occasion of the abdication of Dutch Queen Beatrix and the inauguration of her son Willem-Alexander, I translated with the help of my friend David Nortman a 1890 article from Ha-Melitz reporting the death of King Willem III of the Netherlands. I found this article randomly while looking for materials on the Jewish migration overseas, and thought that it was worth presenting as a pure demonstration of this analytic tool in action, a hilarious combination of cosmopolitanism and provincialism. It reads as "The King is Dead, Long live the… Wait, is it Good for the Jews?".
Posted in: Jewish History
The Gatekeepers-Keeper
January 16, 2013
Raving reviews, both in the Israeli and the foreign media, set the expectation bar for The Gatekeepers high. Perhaps too high. It is indeed a must-see, for Israeli audience. Foreign viewers will definitely be absorbed, and to some extent informed. But it is a historically incomplete movie, and cinematically unimpressive, failing to ascend the sum of the six interviews it comprises.
Posted in: Cinema
Yannay Spitzer 
May 8, 2013
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