As Israeli elections near, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak speaks out about the meaning of Zionism, a one-state vs. two-state solution and the kind of leadership Israel needs ...
It took the Holocaust to make casual anti-Jewish talk so toxic that polite society wouldn’t stand for it. Eroding that sense of toxicity is much easier; internet memes can do it. But it’s also possible to invite backlash against strong, important taboos by clinging to weaker ones that are broader ...
Until white members of our tribe repudiate default correlations between religion and race, and until we treat our black and brown brothers and sisters with equal dignity, we can never fulfill the promise of becoming a diverse, welcoming community in which every individual is seen as tzelem elohim, a mirror ...
Ilhan Omar's tweets caused a controversy. But anti-Semitism in Congress is nothing new. ...
Robert Siegel spoke with Zachary Leader, author of the new biography The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005, at a bookstore in Washington, DC. Bellow "has fantastic mimetic powers, imaginative powers," Leader says, "and he created a range of reference in his language that was new and more ...
The House of Fates is ground zero in a struggle over history and memory, raising questions that are pertinent today not only in Hungary but also across post-communist Europe. The struggle is about the politicization of the Holocaust by an increasingly autocratic government and about who gets to tell its ...
The description of manna in the Bible matches what Danin found in the Sinai Desert. He soon discovered that the white drops on the shrub’s stems were the digestive byproduct of insects that feed on the plant’s sap, known as honeydew. The secretion, formed at night, is loaded with sugar. ...
In Prince of the Press, Joshua Teplitsky brings us inside David Oppenheim's library to explore the ways this collection both reflected and shaped the intellectual heritage of Central European Jewry. ...
The great French film director Jean-Luc Godard called Ben Hecht a “genius” who “invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood today.” Yet most modern American Jews have likely never heard of Hecht, despite his eminence as a playwright, best-selling novelist and screenwriter of a host of Hollywood film ...
American Jews may not know their way around the Talmud or much about Jewish history, but they sure do excel at soul-searching and have for many, many years. In the late 19th century, in the mid-20th and again in our own day, taking the community’s pulse—and finding it weak and ...
Billionaire George Soros has been accused of being anti-Israel and a Nazi collaborator. In the United States, Hungary, Israel, and some parts of American-Jewish community. This story tells how he became vilified. ...