To better understand and eventually confront this menace, we need a word for it. I suggest “xenocide.”

This combines two Greek words to mean the killing of people perceived as foreigners or outsiders. It suggests, rightly, that the act is rooted in racism and xenophobia. It implies the act is fundamentally different from other kinds of killing. It also implies mass killing, because the target is not an individual; it is a group.

It is worth remembering that when World War II began, there wasn’t a word to describe what was happening to the Jews of Europe.

The idea of plazas is as old as cities, and I’m glad to be in this one, looking up at that skinny historic building on 23rd Street in Manhattan, grateful not to be in a cubicle on the fifteenth floor but to be sitting down here in the land of the free. The preachers and buskers and rappers and guys in superhero costumes go elsewhere: this is a quiet ­plaza, its quiet enforced by its occupants, using the power of the New York stare that can stifle interruptions and kill small flowering plants.

Many ‘normal’ people suffer from not being hypersane: they have a restricted worldview, confused priorities, and are wracked by stress, anxiety and self-deception. As a result, they sometimes do dangerous things, and become fanatics or fascists or otherwise destructive (or not constructive) people. In contrast, hypersane people are calm, contained and constructive.

Persuading people to change their minds isn’t easy. Whenever I want to be reminded of that, I return to Tali Sharot’s book “The Influential Mind” (I mentioned this book before in this space). In one of its most revealing paragraphs, Sharot explains that contrary to what many of us might believe, the abundance of available information on every topic doesn’t make us more prone to change our minds; in fact, it makes us more rigid.

Tisha b’Av reminds us that as Jews, we have experienced such hate politics in various cultures and in different time frames… A community such as ours can ill afford to forget its pain. This moment awakens us to anticipate the sounds of the shofar. In this hour of our reflections and at a time that beckons us to remind ourselves of the sacred mission and prophetic intentions of Judaism, we recall the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, challenging us to see our role as being “God’s stake in human history.”

…my visit to Lithuania exposed a visible gap between the government’s declared intentions and the reality on the ground, where efforts to pay homage to the country’s Jewish heritage run up against a hesitancy to deal with its problematic past, including during the Holocaust.

Rabbi Ruhi Sophia Motzkin Rubenstein from Temple Beth Israel in Eugene, Oregon, became TBI’s rabbi in 2015, after graduating from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College.

“This is a generation that was raised in the wilderness-a new generation, poised to enter the land. Moshe is recounting events in this Parasha, some of which are not in the memory of the people. And it’s interesting to see what he focuses on. He doesn’t start with the departure from Egypt. He starts with Sinai.”

I don’t believe in animal sacrifice. Why should I care about Tisha b’Av?

Rabbi Shlomo Seidenfeld: A day that commemorates the profound price we pay for the privilege of being God’s ambassadors in the world.

The Temple embodied this mission and its very air nourished and charged our souls. That loss of consciousness is something to mourn and its rekindling is something to yearn for.

Over and above what Moshe said in the last month of his life, though, is what Moshe did. He changed careers. He shifted his relationship with the people. No longer Moshe the liberator, the lawgiver, the worker of miracles, the intermediary between the Israelites and God, he became the figure known to Jewish memory: Moshe Rabbeinu, “Moses, our teacher.”

With his North African, Jewish-Berber roots, activist Hen Mazzig has unique insights to share about managing Israel’s image.

Hen: “You’d think as a Jew of color who is gay, the left would be a natural fit. And yet from the point of view of the American Jewish and Israeli left, one cardinal sin keeps me from their ranks.”

David: “And what is that?”

Hen: “Being Israeli and a damn proud one.”

Shmuel Rosner and Ze’ev Orenstein talk about the most recent findings in the city of David and the political debate that surrounds it. Ze’ev Orenstein is the Director of International Affairs at City of David Foundation.

Ze’ev: There has been, over the past 150 years of archaeological excavation, overwhelming evidence which affirms events from the Bible.
Shmuel: But there are some people who cast doubt on the narrative as we tend to describe it.
Ze’ev: The doubters aren’t arguing about archaeology, they’re arguing about ideology and politics. There are those for whom the idea of a Jewish historical connection to Jerusalem is a problem, and therefore the archaeology becomes a problem for them.

Walls are something you can see. Something you can touch. Something you can run into and get a nasty bump on your forehead. Or are they? In our episode today—Part III of our miniseries—we tell the stories of three walls that don’t appear on a map.