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?...
2012 March-April
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...
Speaking Volumes | My Spring Break with Philip Roth
By Eric Wasserman 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...
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...
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...
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...
Ask the Rabbis | Are Jews Still Expecting a Messiah?
[vc_row row_type="row" type="full_width" text_align="left" css_animation=""][vc_column][vc_column_text]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...
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,...
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...
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...
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