Is This Mysterious Language Hebrew?

The Voynich manuscript is not written in any known language, and its 35 or so unique symbols have never been seen elsewhere. ...

Jewish Word | Shamash

n the 1946 film The Big Sleep, based on the Raymond Chandler mystery of the same name, Carmen—the promiscuous, drug-addicted younger sister of Lauren Bacall’s character—sizes up Philip Marlowe, played by Humphrey Bogart, and asks him, “What are you, a prizefighter?” Bogart responds, “No, I’m a shamus.” “What’s a shamus?” ...

Illustrated Book Review | Belonging by Nora Krug

Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home Nora Krug Scribner 2018, 288 pp., $30 All drawings by and photos

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Hitler's American Friends

Book Review | Hitler’s American Friends By Bradley W. Hart

Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States By Bradley W. Hart St. Martin’s/Thomas Dunne Books 2018,

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Opinion | The Tough Task of Defining Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of

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editor

From the Editor | Dangerous Rhetoric, Dangerous Times

In 2014, four people were shot to death at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, Belgium, two years after the killings of four Jews, including three children, at the Ozar Hatorah School in Toulouse in the south of France. These tragedies and others like them made it clear that anti-Semitism, that ...

Opinion | What Will It Take to Get the Haredim to Enlist?

For Israelis, bringing teenage sons and daughters barely out of high school to the army induction center to begin their compulsory military service is one of the most fraught and difficult realities of life. Underlying the cheerful, almost celebratory sendoff is the terrifying possibility of one day being forced to ...

Opinion | The Many Gradations of #MeToo

In the year since the Harvey Weinstein case hit the headlines and the #MeToo movement exploded in every direction, I’ve felt increasingly distressed by the number of prominent Jewish men among the accused. Aside from the obvious names—from Senator Al Franken to conductor James Levine, from actors and journalists to ...

Opinion | Poland and Hungary Are the Tip of the Iceberg

The news from Central Europe seems to be uniformly bad: democracy threatened, rule of law subverted, historical revisionism triumphant. It all carries a nasty 1930s flavor. To Western readers, moreover, most of that news seems to come from Budapest and Warsaw. We don’t hear much from such places as Bratislava, ...
traditional family

Debate | ‘The traditional’ family was a relatively late invention’

Is the traditional family the foundation of democracy? It depends what kind of traditional family you’re talking about. Throughout most

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traditional family

Debate | ‘We’ve lost touch with what gives our lives shape and significance’

Is the traditional family the foundation of democracy? It’s the foundation of many things—happiness, social order, identity—and it’s essential to

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Visual Moment | The Beguiling Language of Dress

Ribbed moiré silk from Greece, tulle and silver-tinsel embroidery from Egypt, silk satin from Ottoman Palestine, indigo-dyed goat hair from

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