Catherine Shakdam

4 weeks ago | blogs.timesofisrael.com | Catherine Perez-Shakdam |Catherine Shakdam

On the evening of April 12, Jews across the world will gather to retell our most ancient story. We will speak of slavery and freedom, of cruelty and redemption. We will remember how we were once voiceless, nameless, stripped of dignity—and how, through faith and defiance, we walked into liberty. But this year, the words will catch in our throats. Because in 2025, “Let my people go” is no longer a ritual refrain. It is a living cry.

1 month ago | intpolicydigest.org | Catherine Perez-Shakdam |Catherine Shakdam

The morning’s light broke over Israel with the unmistakable roar of fighter jets, the latest chapter in a war that has never truly ended. The airstrikes over Gaza signaled not just another military manoeuvre but a profound shift in the tide of history—a reckoning long deferred but now, at last, impossible to ignore. For 16 months, Israel has fought to bring home its stolen sons and daughters, to break the iron grip of Hamas, and to restore security to a nation scarred by terror.

1 month ago | blogs.timesofisrael.com | Catherine Perez-Shakdam |Catherine Shakdam

There are moments in intellectual history when an essay appears not merely to comment on events, but to distil an entire civilisational crisis into a single, urgent cry. Cary Nelson’s Mindless: What Happened to Universities?, published in The Jewish Quarterly (Issue 259, March 2025), is such a work—a philosophical intervention that strips bare the illusions of our age and compels us to reckon with a simple, harrowing question: what has become of the university?

1 month ago | blogs.timesofisrael.com | Catherine Perez-Shakdam |Catherine Shakdam

There is something deeply obscene about the way elite American universities have learned to weaponise the First Amendment—not to protect truth, nor to guard minority rights, but to cloak ideological warfare in the comforting folds of academic freedom.

1 month ago | blogs.timesofisrael.com | Catherine Perez-Shakdam |Catherine Shakdam

In the scroll of Esther, unfurled each year amid the revelry of Purim, there lies a whisper, a secret cloaked beneath the masks and the wine. It is not merely a tale of a Jewish queen, a thwarted genocide, or a tyrant’s fall. No, the Megillah, in its silences, speaks of something more profound: the courage to unmask power, the audacity to speak when the world demands silence, and the enigma of a liberation that arrives not with thunder but in the quiet steps of the unseen.