King David’s Genes
Some prominent Jewish families believe they are descended from Israel’s greatest monarch. Can DNA testing prove what their family trees have long shown?
05
Mar
05
Mar
Opinion | Messiahs at the Movies
By Sala Levin
Moment Presents Ten Messianic Flicks
Superman (1978)
In Richard Donner’s adaptation of the comic-book classic, Jor-El (Marlon Brando) launches his son Kal-El (Hebrew for “voice of God”) into space before the planet Krypton blows up. After crash-landing in the Midwest, Kal-El-turned-Superman (Christopher Reeve) stops Lex Luthor’s diabolical plan of nuclear destruction. Jor-El’s prediction that his son’s destiny was to set Earth back on its rightful course is fulfilled.
Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979)
Brian Cohen (Graham Chapman) was just the boy next door before he was mistaken for the Messiah—literally. This popular comedy from director Terry Jones follows the young man born in a stable just a few doors down from Jesus who unintentionally develops a following that believes him to be the world’s savior. This movie, too, has a true following.
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05
Mar
Speaking Volumes | My Spring Break with Philip Roth
At the end of 1995, I briefly dropped out of college. It was an unpleasant time, to say the least. I kept asking myself who I was and, foolishly, desired answers. When I returned to school six months later I thought it might be good to meet some different people. So for spring break 1997 I climbed into a truck with a bunch of new friends for an excursion to the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon and Death Valley. Before we departed, a buddy gave me a paperback copy of Philip Roth’s 1986 book The Counterlife, the fifth of his nine “Zuckerman Novels.” I had read Roth before—admittedly only Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint—and was indifferent to his work. I didn’t see myself in those stories. I wasn’t “those Jews.” My only interest in Roth was observing how he irritated...
05
Mar
Book Review | The Anti-Semite Who Wasn’t
By John Marszalek
Jonathan Sarna’s book When General Grant Expelled the Jews is going to make a significant splash amidst a wave of new books reevaluating the career of one of the most famous Army General/Presidents. On December 16, 1862, General Ulysses S. Grant issued his infamous General Orders No. 11. During his effort to wrest control of the western theater of the Civil War from Confederate forces, Grant struggled to control commercial activity. The drive for profits of some traders within his lines exasperated him and, reflecting the then-common public stereotyping of Jews as financially crafty, he arbitrarily lashed out at Jewish traders and declared that “the Jews as a class” had to be expelled. The pronouncement ordered the eviction of all Jews and not just Jewish traders.
Grant seemed to replicate earlier East European pogroms from which...
05
Mar
Book Review | Jerusalem: The Unholy Story
By Arieh O'Sullivan
Jerusalem is in an awful location. There’s no water. It’s far from any main trade route, surrounded by mountains, and sitting on an earthquake fault. It shouldn’t even exist.
Writer Herman Melville described it during his 1856 visit as a “half-ruinous pile of mouldering grottoes that smelled like death.” Some 1,500 years earlier, a lust-filled hermit called Jerome found a city that had become an entrepot of sanctity, networking and sex. “All temptation is collected here…prostitutes, actors and clowns,” wrote the splenetic Roman who would earn sainthood by translating the Greek Bible into Latin in nearby Bethlehem.
The melancholic prophet Isaiah bemoaned that the city was once a beautiful woman but now was “behaving like a whore.” (Isaiah 1:21) And yet, this city of King David and Solomon, the place of Muhammad’s ascension to heaven...
05
Mar
Book Review | They Don’t Make Jews Like Jesus Anymore
By Pamela Eisenbaum
Daniel Boyarin, professor of Talmudic Culture at the University of California Berkeley, may be the most influential scholar of ancient Judaism today. He also has wide-ranging interests—theology, religion, cultural studies, literary theory—and because Boyarin’s work is interdisciplinary and he writes in an engaging and entertaining style—a talent commonly denigrated as “popularization” among many academics—his work is more accessible to those outside the esoteric world of rabbinic scholarship. But he has not published a book specifically for the general public—until now.
Boyarin has written nine books in English (and a couple in Hebrew), several of which deal with the relationship between Judaism and early Christianity from the second to fifth centuries. The Jewish Gospels, by contrast, mines an earlier stratum of Jewish literature for older evidence that explains the origins of belief in Jesus. Put briefly,...
05
Mar
Ask the Rabbis | Are Jews Still Expecting a Messiah?
INDEPENDENT
Very few of us ever expected the Messiah. We spent most of our history hoping for one. And one day, indeed, the dove will return with those hopes grasped firmly in its beak. But it is up to us to do what Noah did—open the window of the Ark.
Truth be told, the Messiah has probably been here a few hundred times but got spat at on the way to school, or told he wasn’t Jewish enough and had to re-convert, or got ousted from a temple board meeting because he couldn’t pay dues. Who knows? The second-century Rabbi Bibi bar Abaye taught that “If ever a Ro’chom (desert buzzard) would chance to sit on the earth and sing ‘Rak rak,’ it is a sign that the Messiah has come” (Talmud Bav’li, Chulin 63a). I believe...
05
Mar
Jewish Word | A Word Fit for a King
By Caitlin Yoshika Kandil
Today, “messiah” usually brings to mind a personal savior, the end of time, the Kingdom of Heaven—or Jesus Christ. This grand, contemporary understanding, however, hides the word’s humble origins—and its millennia-long evolution.
The word messiah is derived from the Hebrew root mem, shin, chet, meaning to smear, paint or color; to pour oil over the head; or to anoint in a religious service. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, mashiach is used sparingly, typically as a noun or adjective describing a king, priest or prophet who has undergone ritual anointing. In Leviticus, for example, God tells Moses how his people can atone for their sins: “The anointed priest shall bring some of the blood of the bull into the Tent of Meeting.” Similarly, in Chronicles, Solomon stands at an altar before his people and prays: “O Lord...
05
Mar
Nathan Guttman: Is the American Right too Right for Israel?
By Nathan Guttman
This election cycle has officially ended the decades-long debate over whether Israel should be an American campaign issue. For better or worse, it is. We’ve grown used to hearing Israel mentioned in every televised debate and every stump speech, whether to a Jewish crowd in Florida or an evangelical audience in South Carolina. We’ve heard Republican candidates slamming President Obama for what they see as mistreatment of Israel, or, as Mitt Romney has said, “throwing Israel under the bus.”
It’s always great to be the center of attention. But in truth, Israel has nothing to gain from this debate. Republican claims and Democratic counter-claims both put Israel and its leaders in awkward positions. For instance, the entire Israeli leadership, including President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, is now...
05
Mar
Eetta Prince-Gibson: Can a “Messiah” Save Israel Now?
By Eetta Prince-Gibson
“The Messiah is not coming. The Messiah is not going to phone, either.”
In a still-popular song from the 1980s, Israeli rock singer Shalom Hanoch mocks secular messianism. But that hasn’t kept secular Israelis from waiting for a political messiah who will save us from our enemies and, most importantly, from ourselves.
Right now, the Messiah du jour is TV anchor and publicist Yair Lapid, a man without political experience or ideological positions. He’s just the latest in a long list of self-anointed political saviors:
• In 1977, IDF chief of staff-turned-archeologist Yigael Yadin promised to save the country from the corrupt Labor groups that had brought us the Yom Kippur War. In its first election, his party, Dash, won 15 of the 120 seats in the Knesset. In its second election, it won no seats...