Remembering a Beloved Teacher of Hundreds of Jewish Girls

On April 9, Bruria David died in Jerusalem at the age of eighty-four, and was mourned intensely by a segment of the Orthodox world who knew and revered her as a charismatic teacher. Born in New York City to Isaac Hutner, a prominent Polish rabbinic scholar, David spent most of her career directing a seminary for young women located in Jerusalem. Rivka Press Schwartz, one of her many pupils, writes of her legacy:

If people know of Rebbetzin Bruria Hutner David, . . . but did not know her, they probably know two things: that she played an important role in the production of her father Rabbi Isaac Hutner’s masterwork, Paḥad Yitzḥak, and that she earned a PhD from Columbia University. Both of these facts of her biography have been retold often. . . . But as a way of praising her or summarizing her life’s accomplishments, [these items fail to convey] the bold undertaking in ḥaredi women’s education that was her life’s work.

From one institution based in the Matersdorf neighborhood of Jerusalem, she hoped to rearrange the mental furniture of ḥaredi women chosen for their academic ability and their willingness to have their mental furniture rearranged. Thus equipped, these women would go on to be the teachers and rebbetzins and mentors and mothers who would reshape American ḥaredi Jewry to become more formal, more dignified, more aware of the uniqueness and incomparable worth of Torah (as well as more proud of its distinctiveness), less acculturated, and less, well, American.

Rebbetzin David’s worldview emphasized the primacy of Torah—not in the reductive way of “you should marry a man [who studies in post-yeshiva religious academy],” but in the underlying philosophical way that means that whatever field of study or profession her students pursued, it would be with a deep understanding of the way that the Torah’s wisdom is incomparable to the wisdom of any discipline or academic endeavor. Whether that teaching ended up shaping her students’ or their husbands’ life choices, it would shape how they spoke, how they thought, whom they admired, and which accomplishments they most highly praised.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Haredim, Jewish education, Orthodoxy, Yitzchok Hutner

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023