Herbert Belkin

Hert Belkin is a historian who lectures and writes on modern Jewish history.

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Oct 4, 2020, 3:11 AM

The Day the Jewish World Stood Still

For 1800 years Jews had prayed for this day. It was the same day that Herzl, Weizmann, Ben Gurion and Golda Meir dedicated their lives to achieve. The day was November 29, 1947. On that day, the United Nations...

Sep 16, 2020, 12:39 AM

The Sound of Ancient Israel

The Temple in Jerusalem is gone. The priests who walked its halls are gone. The smoke that rose from the sacrificial alter has long since dissipated. Sadly, even the sacred Ark of the Covenant has disappeared. Along with our Torah,...

Sep 14, 2020, 7:10 AM

An Aircraft Carrier for Israel

On a hot July afternoon in 1945, a tight-lipped David Ben Gurion addressed a group of American Jewish businessmen in the Manhattan apartment of Rudolf Sonneborn. Sonneborn was a wealthy Jewish industrialist who had traveled to Palestine where he...

Sep 8, 2020, 12:35 AM

Hermann Goering Was Furious

By 1938 Hitler had put Jews on the road to annihilation. Polish Jews who lived in Germany at that time were singled out for a particularly grievous form of Jew-hatred. In October of that year, Germany expelled 17.000 Jews...

Aug 30, 2020, 11:32 PM

The danger in defending Judaism

Granger Historical Archive Throughout the Middle Ages, the Catholic Dominican Order of Preachers held "disputations" to convince Jews that Jesus was the true Messiah. These disputations, or forced debates between Christians and Jews, were far from even-handed since the outcome...

Jul 29, 2020, 9:52 PM

Israel No Longer a Jewish State?

In a recent New York Times article, Jewish columnist Peter Beinart writes that he has given up hope for a two state solution between Israelis and Palestinians. Beinart goes even further with his explosive statement that he "no longer...

Sep 24, 2019, 8:22 PM

Angel wings on Yom Kippur

When Kol Nidre is sung on the eve of Yom Kippur, Jews everywhere are wrapped in spiritual emotion as they pray to be entered in the Book of Life. Jewish tradition says that on that sacred eve, you can...

Aug 8, 2019, 4:39 AM

It was delicious; it was stomach filling; it was right out of shtetl kitchens. It also was one of the foods of the shtetl that did not cross the Atlantic with Ashkenazi Jews. The dish is called helzel, a...

Jun 26, 2019, 4:12 AM

The Shortcomings of Jewish Education in America

The last two hundred years saw major events in the Jewish world. Jews gained citizenship, received secular educations as Jewish enlightenment (Haskalah) spread through Europe and were enthralled by Theodor Herzl's Zionism as a vision for a Jewish homeland....

Jun 17, 2019, 11:57 PM

Baron Montefiore and His Defense of Jews

Baron Moses Montefiore, by Henry Weigall, oil on canvas, 1881.

In 1840 a Catholic priest was missing in the city of Damascus, then part of the dissolute Ottoman Empire. The search for the priest led to the Jewish ghetto and uncovered, not the priest, but the scourge of 12th...

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About Me

Historian Herb Belkin writes and lectures on the epic events of the last two hundred years of Jewish history. His field of study covers Zionism, the Jewish Diaspora and the critical struggle for a Jewish homeland. Herb has taught courses on modern Jewish history at Brandeis, Tufts and Salem State University. He is a columnist for the Jewish Advocate and was a speaker for the Israeli Consulate of New England.

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