A.M. New York: Highlights for Lilith Readers
I happened on th
is free city rag on the subway this morning and was impressed by all the items I thought might be of interest to my fellow Lilith fans and thought I’d share the wealth. Unfortunately, none of my favorites are actually on their website so I’m providing other links where they were available:
NYPD “Hercules” teams are guarding synagogues during Passover in response to a newly posted threatening Al Qaida mock movie poster.
Seriously – you don’t often come across this much exciting cross cultural material in a three sentence article. Al Qaida, a fundamentalist Muslim terrorist group that, among other things, would like to purify Islam of outside influences, has prepared an impressively designed poster that could easily be blazoned across a bus to promote a new Hollywood film if it weren’t for the (surely unintentional) sexual double entendre: “Al Quaeda: Coming Soon Again in New York.”
“Hercules,” of course, was an ancient Greek demi-god known for his strength. Some ancient Jews embraced Hellenism (apparently one scribe claimed that two sons of Abraham joined Hercules on his Africa expedition) and others strenuously resisted it, culminating in a bloody civil war – see Hannukah. The cultural resonances of American “Hercules” teams guarding Jewish synagogues during the holiday when we commemorate escaping from Egypt to become a sovereign people in our own land are wonderful to ponder. (Incidentally, the planes used by the IDF in the Entebbe raid were also called Hercules).
