For the past few years, I’ve been debating within my head the whole standing during the sirens issue. Both on Holocaust Memorial Day, and today for fallen soldiers. Something about the rituals on both days bother me, and at times it gives me the creeps in a “big brother” kind of way. The way a state can make so many citizens stand still for two minutes seems like a bit too much control for my liking. I guess that’s one of the reasons (among many) I decided to attend the alternative Combatants for Peace Memorial Day ceremony last night. Yet,…

The Jewish diaspora didn't always march lockstep behind Israel. My great-grandmother--who escaped pogroms and lost family in the Holocaust--was an anti-Zionist. Rampant anti-Semitism drove my great-grandmother from Eastern Europe. There’d been pogroms; there were restrictions on the type of work Jews could do. My family made their way to New York City with little more than the clothes on their backs; the relatives they’d left behind disappeared during the Holocaust, never to be heard from again. So when the United Nations voted in favor of the partition of Palestine in 1947, my great-grandmother’s son, my grandfather, rejoiced. He ran into…