Ask the Rabbis // Religion & Science
In what ways, if any, do science and Judaism conflict?
Moment in Music // Michael Bloomfield
By Josh Tapper
On February 15, 1981, Michael Bloomfield’s body was discovered in a parked car on a San Francisco side street. The 37-year-old Jewish blues guitar...
Book Review | Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem
Before I began reading Dissident Gardens, Jonathan Lethem’s new novel, I was advised to obtain a copy of Vivian Gornick’s Romance of American Communism for a little crash course on its context.
Book Review: The Book of Schmaltz by Michael Ruhlman
Think you know what to eat to stay healthy? That fats are bad for you? That you will never again be able to enjoy the umami taste of schmaltz on a piece of matzoh? Or the crunch of gribenes (chicken-skin cracklings) that brings back the joys of your grandmother’s kitchen?
Book Review | Countrymen by Bo Lidegaard
Shortly after my bar mitzvah in 1943 at the Great Synagogue of Copenhagen, where my father had arrived from Czechoslovakia in 1934 to be the chief cantor, the roof caved in with all the uncertainties, terror and threats of annihilation. My family, along with some seven to eight thousand Danish Jews, were forced to flee their homes.
Fiction // The Inker
Avi knew his sister would take the news badly. Seven years his junior, Avi’s sister was given to fits of feeling, storms of wild emotion. This evening, as Avi awaited his sister in his home, he adjusted the plates at the dining room table, wiped the insides of wine glasses with the bottom of his shirt and folded and re-folded the three maps he’d purchased that day—topographic, political, historical—and had fanned on the table’s end.
Foie Gras: The Indelicate Delicacy
Foie gras—the controversial and expensive delicacy described by the renowned food encyclopedia Larousse Gastronomique as “one of the jewels in the crown of French gastronomy”—is made from the liver of a specially fattened duck or goose
Jewish Word / Sechel
The (Jewish) Sixth Sense
By George E. Johnson
In his autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me, Marlon Brando writes at length about the transformative role Jews played in his...
A Visual Moment / A Medieval Manuscript
By Diane M. Bolz
Maimonides Illuminated
One of the finest and most elaborate illuminated Hebrew manuscripts in existence is now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of...
Interview: Richard Saul Wurman
The restless architect and designer who dreamed up TED hasn’t stopped inventing new ways of organizing information in search of what he calls “the God of understanding.”