Izgad

The Passover Seder tells the story of Passover through three different time frames. We see the Exodus from the perspective of those who left Egypt, but also from the perspective of the Patriarchs...

http://izgad.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-exodus-past-present-and-future.html

Years ago, I wrote about sexual morality from a Kantian perspective, arguing that sex outside of a relationship such as marriage violated the categorical imperative to see others as ends and not ...

http://izgad.blogspot.com/2024/04/community-building-and-sexual-morality.html

A common criticism of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes is that Calvin is not a plausible six-year-old. There are too many aspects of his character, such as his language and reasoning, that clear...

http://izgad.blogspot.com/2024/04/calvin-philosophical-child.html

(Part I, II)While leftist revolutionaries around the world came to embrace third-world peasants, Arab nationalists, and even Islamists as manifestations of the People, Western revolutionaries had...

http://izgad.blogspot.com/2024/04/in-search-of-people-part-iii.html

 Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem is one of my favorite works of science fiction. I have just started watching the Netflix adaptation so I do not yet have a firm opinion of it. One of the thin...

http://izgad.blogspot.com/2024/03/three-body-blood-libel-narrative.html

(Part I)The problem for classical Marxists was that workers in the West proved not to be particularly revolutionary at all. They were easily bought off with modest progressive reforms such as sho...

http://izgad.blogspot.com/2024/03/in-search-of-people-part-ii.html

 Since I have previously written about Marxist anti-Semitism, I should acknowledge an example of an exception that I have encountered. At the city council meeting, I encountered Laura G...

http://izgad.blogspot.com/2024/03/philo-semitic-marxists.html

 Last night I attended a Pasadena city hall meeting for a vote on a ceasefire resolution for the Israel-Hamas war. (If you look at the photo attached to the article, I am the person standing...

http://izgad.blogspot.com/2024/03/opposing-ceasefire-in-pasadena-before.html

We have previously discussed the role of Motte and Bailey tactics in leftist revolutionary thought. Words like critical thinking, education, racism, oppression, and genocide do not mean what most...

http://izgad.blogspot.com/2024/03/in-search-of-people-part-i.html

This post owes a debt to Clarissa. I made the decision not to talk about Russia here for the purpose of space and lack of competency in the field but much of what I say here about Hamas and the l...

http://izgad.blogspot.com/2024/03/oppression-and-alienation-understanding.html

To return to the issue of Chabad and its methods of outreach. It is interesting to compare Chabad to Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option. Dreher urges Christians to recognize that they have lost the c...

http://izgad.blogspot.com/2024/02/chabad-and-benedict-option.html

   I was recently helping a student with an assignment on putting Christopher Columbus on trial. The student struck me as reasonably intelligent and without any strong political axes to...

http://izgad.blogspot.com/2024/02/genocide-ecocide-and-christopher.html

As a follow-up to the previous post, I hope it is obvious to my readers that there is a profound distinction between pursuing justice/revenge and self-defense. Israel’s actions in Gaza are defe...

http://izgad.blogspot.com/2024/01/fighting-for-peace-in-gaza.html

 It is commonly argued that oppression leads to violence. This argument can take the form of outright apologetics for terrorism. It is “understandable” that Hamas launched the attacks of...

http://izgad.blogspot.com/2024/01/avenging-noam-why-oppression-does-not.html

 Among my favorite musicals is Rent. I confess that I feel guilty about some of the more problematic aspects of the musical. It is not as if I actually approve of the life choices made by an...

http://izgad.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-paradox-of-bohemian-community.html

 In the previous post, I discussed Charles Taylor's argument that the Protestant notion of privacy led to the rise of modern secularism. Here, I would like to use the example of Chabad as a ...

http://izgad.blogspot.com/2023/11/public-judaism-chabads-outreach-playbook.html

Charles Tayor’s Secular Age is one of those rare books that are nearly a thousand pages but demand close reading. At the center of his narrative regarding the rise of secularism is the rise of ...

http://izgad.blogspot.com/2023/11/protestantism-privacy-and-rise-of.html

In the previous post, I spoke about how Paulo Freire uses his made-up problem of banking education as a deceitful Motte and Bailey argument in favor of turning education into ideological indoctri...

http://izgad.blogspot.com/2023/11/i-am-palestine.html

There is a type of Motte and Bailey argument where you offer a strawman version of the opposition that no serious person believes. Having presented a problem that does not really exist or at leas...

http://izgad.blogspot.com/2023/11/paulo-freires-bank-of-motte-and-bailey.html

 Years ago, I did a series of posts on C. S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces, but I never really felt happy with how I explained the ending. Essentially, I tried to keep with the id...

http://izgad.blogspot.com/2023/09/oruals-blindness-understanding-end-of.html

  Previously, I explored Haredi education through an Abie Rotenberg song. I would like to continue to use Abie Rotenberg to better understand Jewish thought. The song "Journey at Sea" from t...

http://izgad.blogspot.com/2023/09/voyaging-into-jewish-history.html

Imagine if a Jew and a Christian took off in the TARDIS to the year 2023 BCE to preach their faiths. As there is no such thing as Judaism or Christianity at this time, our Jew and Christian would...

http://izgad.blogspot.com/2023/08/time-traveling-missionaries-or-why.html

 In an earlier post, I explored why I felt I had an easier time reading conservative Christians than woke leftists. The practical implication of this is that I recognize that I struggle...

http://izgad.blogspot.com/2023/08/ground-rules-for-discourse-with-me.html

 Growing up with one foot in the Haredi world, I was surrounded by a particular narrative about Jews and gentiles. The non-Jews around us might appear, at first glance, to be decent people b...

http://izgad.blogspot.com/2023/07/critical-anti-semitism-theory-33-project.html

 As a principled classical liberal, I believe in the importance of reading things that one disagrees with the goal of being able to pass an Ideological Turing Test. This means being able to ...

http://izgad.blogspot.com/2023/07/am-i-to-blame-for-killing-your-lord-or.html