CONTEXT

CONTEXT

The purpose of this podcast is to provide the larger context to the situation in the Middle East. The history will be provided through audio recordings of my late father, Dr. David Neiman –an expert on the history of the ancient near east and the relationship between the Church and the Jews. He based his theses on historical records, linguistics and a deep understanding of the Bible and its origins.

Episodes

Purim: The Same Old Story

March 2, 2015 • 22 mins
Megillath Esther tells the story of a close call for the Jews, when a great threat, posed by the evil minister Haman, was thwarted by the beautiful Queen Esther and her uncle Mordechai. The Purim story describes what would become a template for future cycles of anti-Jewish hatred. In this podcast Dr. David Neiman gives a dramatic account of the battles of Salamis and Thermopylae. It is at these battles that the Persian...
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Paris - Still Burning

January 28, 2015 • 16 mins
The phenomenon of Jews returning to Israel did not start after World War II, it began hundreds of years earlier. After the collapse of the Crusader kingdoms in the 13th century, Jews started returning to Israel. The driving force behind this migration was the growing anti-Jewish agitation on the European continent. One of the most destructive flare-ups of anti-Jewish hatred in medieval Europe was the Great Bonfire ...
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January: A Time For Reformation

January 12, 2015 • 18 mins
In January of 1518 Martin Luther's "95 Thesis", an attack on the sale of Indulgences by the Catholic Church, was translated and distributed through a revolutionary technology - the printing press. Martin Luther captured the spirit of the moment with his thesis. The publication of this tract, gave voice to the sentiments of a heretofore-silent majority in Northern Europe.
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Time And Space For The New Year

December 29, 2014 • 15 mins
The official practice of numbering the years in sequence started with the emperor Seleucus. He chose 311 B.C.E., the year he came to power, as the year One. The Seleucid system was adopted by the Jews of Babylon who referred to this newly accepted practice as the "era of dating legal documents". About 700 years later the Jews of Babylonia recalculated the number for the Jewish calendar and that is the dating system used to...
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Jesus: Another Jewish Over Achiever

December 22, 2014 • 16 mins
This episode of Context explores the Jewish character of Jesus, as described in the Gospels. Dr. David Neiman reads passages from the New Testament that paint a portrait of Jesus as a normal first century Jewish boy from a modest, traditional Jewish family. The words of Jesus, as recorded in the Gospels, are replete with references from Jewish literature, both traditional texts and popular works of the 1st Century AD s...
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It's All Greek To Me - The Complicated Story of Hanukkah

December 14, 2014 • 38 mins
It’s no surprise that winter holidays around the world have light as their central theme. So too is the case with Hanukkah where we celebrate the miracle of the olive oil that fueled the Menorah at the rededication of the Temple of Jerusalem by the Maccabees in 164 B.C.E. But as you might expect, the story of Hanukkah is a lot more complicated than one might imagine. Getting to that olive oil is a journey through the diss...
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When Empires Weaken

December 7, 2014 • 15 mins
The Muslim conquests of the 7th Century marked the definitive end to the power of Rome. By the time of Muhammad, Rome had been engaged in a war with the Persian empire that had endured for more than a hundred years. Rome and Persia were worn out. They had exhausted their resources. The collapse of those empires gave rise to the Islamic age. The audio segment in this podcast of Dr. David Neiman was recorded in January of...
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The "A" word with Dry Bones – Yaakov Kirschen

November 24, 2014 • 52 mins
Anti-Jewish prejudice existed before Islam and before Christianity. Opinions critical of Jews were recorded in ancient, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. To discuss the issue of anti-Jewish hatred, or the "A" word, I am joined via Skype, with Israeli cartoonist, Yaakov Kirschen, creator of the Dry Bones comic strip. Dry Bones is internationally syndicated and has been in publication in the Jerusalem Post and other outlets for ov...
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A DNA match with history

November 18, 2014 • 16 mins
This episode was inspired by recent study that was conducted by Columbia University and published in the journal, Nature Communications. The researchers found that all Ashkenazi Jews are descended from a 350 person “bottleneck” that occurred a mere 600 to 800 years ago. The idea seems incredible, that the origins of such a large and successful segment of the Jewish people could be so recent. But the science corresponds ...
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Stepping in a Kurd

November 13, 2014 • 9 mins
Six years ago I posted a video on YouTube about the ancient kingdom of Assyria. I had no idea what a firestorm of comments this video segment would ignite. It seems that the mention of the geographical region of "Kurdistan" was incendiary. Since the video was uploaded, pages and pages of comments have been posted. Some are angry rants and others are detailed explanations of the history of the region. When this lecture was ...
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31.7780° N, 35.2354° E - The Dome of the Rock

November 13, 2014 • 11 mins
If there ever was an energy vortex on this planet, it is the rock in the center of The Dome of the Rock. Jews believe it is the place where Abraham took Isaac for sacrifice. Muslims believe that it was Ishmael who was chosen by Abraham for the same task. Jews believe it is the site of the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctuary of the Jewish Temple. Muslims believe that Muhammed ascended to heaven from that same spot. ...
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CONTEXT: The Lord, The Land, The Law

November 11, 2014 • 25 mins
Father Felix F. Talbot, SJ was a colleague of my father’s in the theology department at Boston College, a Catholic university outside of Boston. “He likes to make up clever little devices to help his students remember things”, my father told me. “The lord, the land, the law” was the mnemonic device Father Talbot used to help his students remember the three elements that define the Jewish people: the conception of one god,...
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