Yonathan Bar-On

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Aug 6, 2024, 2:59 PM

Berlin Becomes a Classroom

Participants of the Centropa Summer Academy 2024 in Berlin.

All the photos used in this article were made by Wojciech Wojtkielewicz, courtesy of Centropa. Last month, I traveled to Berlin for a week, to learn more about the history of European Jewry in the 20th century but also to...

Jul 17, 2023, 7:22 AM

Learning, walking, and feeling European-Jewish history

In the first half of July, 75 elementary, middle and high school teachers from the USA, Israel and more than a dozen European countries spent eight hot days of their summer vacation in Vienna and Prague. They worked together...

Oct 12, 2021, 9:24 AM

Building Bridges, and Crossing Them

During the second half of the Succoth vacation, thirty teachers from Germany and Israel spent four days working together. After a three days’ stay in Berlin, we traveled for one day to Hamburg. Under the heading “Building Bridges between...

May 16, 2021, 6:39 PM

An Open Note to Trevor Noah

Dear Trevor, At first I wanted to write you an open letter, but then David Harris already did that, also as a blog post on Times of Israel, so I decided to write you an open note, not a letter....

Apr 27, 2021, 11:46 AM

To Dare, Persevere, and Tell

Dudi Zohar z"l (Courtesy of the Zohar family)

If you really want to know and understand Israel (its Jewish majority, that is), you have to know how to listen. Israel is built on stories. Nothing gives better insight in the essence of this country than the stories...

Aug 24, 2020, 12:27 PM

I’m not sure whether I am one of the two grumpy Muppets, Statler and Waldorf, or maybe the child from The Emperor’s New Clothes. Ever since Trump and Netanyahu announced their ‘deal of the century’, virtually all media have...

Aug 21, 2020, 12:26 PM

Peace Begins at Home

Peace Begins at Home When I heard about the ‘deal’ between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, I was reminded of the Dutch comedian Herman Finkers. He once joked about a village that had cable television but still was waiting...

Nov 14, 2016, 2:07 PM

On Wednesday morning, my wife forwarded me a ‘joke’ through Whatsapp: "What’s worse, 9/11 or 11/9?" No matter how cynical, or even sick, that sentence may be, you cannot deny that those two dates are linked to each other,...

Jul 27, 2016, 8:01 PM

It’s Time for the Forces of Light to Shine

Last Saturday our 9-year-old son and I saw Disney’s Zootopia, which both of us liked very much. It contains at least two messages that appear to be more American than ever: we all suffer from prejudice, and each of...

Sep 29, 2015, 6:35 PM

‘We Count For Nothing’

On 1 September, the beginning of the school year in Israel, the director-general of the Ministry of Education said that the opening of the school year had been “smooth”. According to the website of the ministry, the school year had...

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About Me

Yonathan Bar-On (Bert de Bruin) is a historian and an EAL teacher. He teaches English at the Leo Baeck Education Center in Haifa, and has written extensively for Dutch newspapers, and occasionally for American and Israeli newspapers and online media. Yonathan writes a weekly column for the Dutch daily Friesch Dagblad. In 1995 he immigrated to Israel from the Netherlands.