Cultural Insanity

One of the best blogs out there is Breath Of The Beast by Yaacov Ben Moshe. Yaacov specializes in longer posts which are extremely thought-provoking.

Here's a taste of his latest:


Cultural Insanity Part II The Cultural Analog

On April 23rd 1891 the Jews of Moscow were expelled from that city and forced to resettle in the pale of settlement. It was one more pogrom added to the endemic but accelerating European anti-Semitic assault that reached its horrific climax fifty years later.

In the seventy years since my great grandfather Nathan Channen’s death, a tattered piece of paper, the remnant of an official form of Imperial Czarist Russia, has been passed down in my family. His daughter, my paternal grandmother, gave it to my father back in 1975 and a few months ago my father gave it to me. None of us ever had any idea what it was. Last week I finally got this ragged piece of paper to a good friend of mine who is a native Russian speaker. He and his wife kindly translated as much of this archaic and fragile document as they could. Here is what we have learned from that paper.


Go read the whole thing.