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Seven Questions We Need to Ask in 5781

“Since the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem”, says the Talmud, “prophecy has been taken from prophets and given to fools and children.” In other words, there’s no way of knowing what the future holds. But if I can’t prophesize, I can at least, ask questions. And the questions are more important than the answers, for they can spark important communal conversations.


Read JFN President and CEO Andrés Spokoiny's full article (on page 6) in "The Year of the Mask," a special High Holidays supplement published by the Australia-based Plus61J Media. Edited by Elan Ezrahi, an educator and specialist in Jewish peoplehood and Israel-Diaspora relations, the supplement also includes essays and reflections by Limmud Co-Founder Clive Lawton, OneTable CEO and Co-Founder Aliza Kline, and many others.

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Andres's Substack

Notes from a Liminal Time

This Substack is driven by a simple frustration: too many conversations today are loud, moralized, and shallow at the same time. The spaces in which ideas can be discussed with intellectual depth are increasingly rare and often inaccessible.

Here, I write about contemporary Jewish and global issues, Jewish identity, antisemitism, philanthropy, community, and, at times, philosophy and science. The scope is intentionally eclectic.

These essays are addressed to readers interested in a deeper, more nuanced engagement with our moment, one that resists moral grandstanding and reflexive outrage, favors historical perspective and conceptual rigor, and refuses to treat complexity as a moral failure.

I engage in muscular polemics and intellectual guerrilla tactics when necessary. But the premise of this page is that, at times, it is also essential to slow down and think seriously. The underlying belief is simple but unfashionable: even in an age of clickbait and epistemic chaos, the effort is still worth it.

Who is this for: While some of the posts may sound like “inside baseball” for Jewish leaders and activists, this is for anyone—Jewish or not—interested in the forces reshaping communities, societies, and the world writ large. In sum, anybody who’s intellectually curious and unafraid of complexity.

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© 2035 by Andres Spokoiny.

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