By the time Prohibition began, Jews did make up a significant portion of the alcohol industry—most often in the whiskey business, working as distillers or distributors. But a smaller cohort of Jews also made their mark as cocktail bartenders.
This past spring, Trayon White Sr., a Washington, DC city councilmember, sparked an outcry by blaming a late season snowfall on the Rothschilds, the famous Jewish banking dynasty, who, he explained, control “the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities.”
On the Surface of Silence, the final collection of legendary Israeli poet Lea Goldberg, is a book of splendor in more ways than one. With its large 10×10 format, a beautiful cover photo of a desert landscape, a selection of mystical pen-and-ink drawings by the poet, and the haunting poems themselves in Hebrew and English on facing pages, as if afloat in a world of silence
“Would your Jewish robot be like the Jetsons’ Rosie, who’d make perfect Shabbat challah and your aunt’s amazing latkes?”
We are waking up to the fact that Mizrachim now make up more than half of all Israeli Jews. And not only do Mizrachim come from a different part of the world, but they also continue to view Zionism, Judaism, religion and gender very differently than do Jews of European descent.
Little known in English, Aguinis has been a Latin American literary powerhouse for 50 years, turning out elegant, prize-winning bestsellers that have explored everything from Argentine history to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the life of Maimonides, all to the praise of his largely non-Jewish audience.
Chanoch Levin spearheaded the development of Israel’s famed defensive shield against short-range rockets. For the first time, he shares some of the previously undisclosed details of how a concept more likely to be found in a science fiction thriller became a reality.
We asked experts and aficionados to recommend their top five books on timely and intriguing subjects—from trends in American Judaism to Jewish romance.
Bold and unapologetic, the marathon-running, opera-loving public intellectual has weighed in on everything from aging to the nature of evil. Her goal? To make philosophy useful in our day-to-day lives.
America was conceived as a haven of refuge—Thomas Paine says so in Common Sense—for people fleeing from religious and political repression and violence all over the world. He said we would be an “asylum for mankind,” and he did not mean an insane asylum
Yossi Klein Halevi has taken on several roles in the Israeli-Palestinian drama since he made aliyah in 1982. He’s been a protagonist in the conflict—“I chose a side when I became an immigrant”—and served in the army during the first intifada. Later, he became a journalist, trying to understand both sides’ complexity
Jews must take the lead in standing up to the Hungarian leader’s anti-Semitism.
