Ask the Rabbis // Arrogance
Are there aspects of Judaism that encourage arrogance—or that help guard against it?
Book Review // The Talmud: A Biography Banned, Censored and Burned…The Book They Couldn’t Suppress
Full disclosure: I am not a biblical or Talmudic scholar. As a professor of literature, I have taught selections from the Bible in humanities courses. I think of myself as a secular humanist and an agnostic interested in understanding the role of religion in the lives of millions of people.
Book Review // Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France
French anti-Semitism, c’est une vieille histoire. True, following the Revolution, les Juifs were liberated from their ghettos. True, the Jewish Leon Blum was elected prime minister of France during the late 1930s. And true, except for the United States and Israel, no other country contains so many Jews—some 600,000 according to the latest statistics.
Book Review // An officer and a Spy
Be wary of historical fiction, especially if it’s good. It will forever mix up in your mind what actually happened, or what we can be fairly certain happened, with the inventions of playwrights and novelists, whose aim might be to draw a deeper meaning from events than mere facts can provide, but who do some violence to those puny facts.
Book Review // Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food
90th Birthday Tribute to the Legendary Theodore Bikel
The Precursor to “Gentleman’s Agreement”
Gaza: A History // A Long Look at a Small Place
Today, the Palestinian enclave of Gaza is known as a flashpoint for conflict that far eclipses its minuscule size. At 140 square miles—sharing an eight-mile frontier with Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and hugging Israel’s border for nearly 32 miles—the sliver of desert is only twice the area of the District of Columbia.
Film Watch // Three Minutes in Poland
A teenager with a big smile grins at the camera. Another waves his hand and keeps moving to stay in the picture. A bearded man is helped down the stairs of a building as groups of young and old crowd the streets of a small town, all anxious to be a part of this remarkable movie.
Rabbi Joachim Prinz: The Jewish Leader Who Bridged Two Journeys, From Slavery to Freedom
Rabbi Joachim Prinz’s moment at the podium represented the fulfillment of both the prophetic Jewish role in history and of his life’s journey.
Bringing the Pew to the Bench: Moment/Newseum Discussion on How Religion Influences Supreme Court Justices
On October 27, Moment and the Religious Freedom Center of the Newseum Institute partnered to bring a provocative discussion on religion and the Supreme Court.