Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

President Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital has done more than upend 70 years of American policy. It has underli...

It's Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day. According to the Jewish calendar, 49 years since Israeli troops took East Jerusalem, including the...

Look, I know everyone is all worked up about the Netanyahu speech in Congress, scheduled for a couple of hours from now. But as I've sai...

I'm riding out this round of Israeli-Gaza violence without blogging, as a good civil servant should. In the midst of it, however,the New...

Jewish cemeteries are fascinating places. I was in one this morning, and noticed this gravestone. It's the final resting place of Ch...

The Jews have been around for quite a while now - 3,000 years, give or take half a millennum and depending upon whom you ask and what criter...

I took this snapshot recently near the Israel State Archives (you can see a sign pointing to us in the upper left). It shows the sign on a t...

The neighborhood pool just happens also to be the only full-sized Olympic pool in Jerusalem, and we've got some active swim-teams. Yeste...

Here are two sets of pictures. (Click and you should see them enlarged) Kaffit on Emek Refaim at dawn on a hot September day, and the same...

No-one really knows how many people attended the funeral of the Rav Ovadia Yosef last night. If it was 700,000, that's more than 10% of...

Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi is one of the most quoted scholars in the Talmud - assuming he was one scholar and not two, which he may have been. ...

It's been ages since I did a "daf yomi" post. (The idea was presented and explained here ). So here's a quick one, about J...

It's on Mount Zion, but I doubt that will help.

The other day we went to see the new film about Hannah Arendt , directed by Margarethe von Trotta (2012). If you're into Batman films or...

It's Yom Hazikaron today, the mournful day of commemoration for the 25-thousand-plus Israelis who have died in our century-long conflict...

Matti Friedman has an interesting article at Time of Israel about how Jerusalem is becoming ever more integrated in the reality, even as ...

I assure you, improbable as it may seem, that the following photos were all taken just the other day, within the municipal lines of Jerusale...

I suppose I should start a photo-blog at Tumblr. But that would be yet another demand on my time. So here are a few pictures from the day af...

This morning I woke up and decided I've been working too hard, so I'd take the day off. I spent the morning walking around, taking b...

As I've said, being a high-ranking civl servant means not publicly writing on political matters. Yet the intensity of misinformation bei...