Deborah Baker. The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2011. How many years has it been since I first heard of Maryam Jameelah, the former Margaret (“Peggy”) Marcus? At least 15 or 20, I think. Sometime in the 90s, I was in a library paging through an issue of … [Read more...]
UFO Story From Israel
If you follow this link you may have trouble reading the story, posted to the Israeli site news.nana10.co.il on March 14. So I will translate the Hebrew, with some help from my Israeli friends Sarah and Marc Bregman. Apologies for the somewhat stilted style. A GAP IN THE ARCHIVE: WHO CONCEALED … [Read more...]
The Kabbalah Centre, 2003 – Zohar to the Palestinians
Read this post, if you want, as a belated tribute to the World Day of Prayer, observed last Thursday on the day better known as Patriot Day or simply 9/11. Or as a memorial to the late Philip Berg, head of the LA-based "Kabbalah Centre" where the celebs--most visibly, Madonna--learn their … [Read more...]
“Outtakes of a UFO Investigator” – Israel August
"Now Pop was gone and Danny was here. Or rather, he’d been here until a few minutes ago but now he was gone too ... . Off to an alien land called Israel, which all of them knew existed and was where they somehow belonged, but which none of them could quite imagine." That's from chapter 6 of … [Read more...]
Sadat in Israel – Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind
"We now show uncorrelated targets approaching from the north-northwest ..." --"Close Encounters of the Third Kind" In reality, it was more like the southwest from which the alien craft made its approach. But otherwise, the climactic scene in the Spielberg movie--the one where the UFOs make a … [Read more...]
