Monday, August 19, 2019
Arts & Culture
The Wonder of Haggadah Imagery
Adam S. Cohen surveys the history of the illustrated Haggadah from the Middle Ages to today....
Visual Moment | The Ringelblum Archive
Even before the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto (1940-1943) knew of the “Final Solution,” they understood that their story needed to be preserved. Under the leadership of Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum, a clandestine organization of about 60 researchers with the code name Oyneg Shabes (“the...
Jewish Word | Maven
“Maven” is a relatively new transplant into American English. Written references to the word begin to increase in the mid-1960s and continued to rise through the early 2000s, according to Google Ngrams, which charts words’ popularity in books over time....
Ten Sephardic Films to Watch Today
As the 2018 edition of the festival wound to a close last week, we asked Sara Nodjoumi, the festival’s artistic director and producer of The Iran Job, among other films, to tell us about her favorite Sephardic films....
The Epic Battle In Hollywood Over The Holy Land
In The City Where Myths Are Made, The Israeli And Palestinian Storyline Is Always In Rewrite....
Book Review | Mapping the Bones by Jane Yolen
Although a work of fiction, Mapping the Bones has enough of a historical basis to make it read like a convincing survivor’s account, one that does the essential work of bearing witness to a tattered and bloody past....
Book Review | In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea by Michael Brenner
Brenner’s In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea chronicles the competing ambitions to preserve and nourish Jews and Judaism in safety, embraced by an array of Jewish thinkers and leaders from the late 19th century into the present. Would it be by assimilating...
Book Review | A History of Judaism by Martin Goodman
A History of Judaism Martin Goodman Princeton University Press 2018, 656 pp, $28.08 Surveys of religious literacy show that, as a group, American Jews do not know very much about the history of their religious tradition. In one recent poll, for example, fewer than half of those surveyed knew...
Talk of the Table | A Naturally Gluten-Free Holiday
For many Jews, Passover is about what you can’t eat. Those who observe the holiday’s dietary rules must avoid chametz: wheat, rye, spelt, barley or oats. But because these ingredients—with the exception, sometimes, of oats—also happen to be the primary sources of gluten in our...