From the Editor | The Miracle That Is Jewish Jokes
Believe it or not, I grew up in a Jewish family that didn’t tell jokes.
The Conversation
Your spring issue addressing community today (“What Is Community Today?” Spring 2021) could not have arrived at a timelier moment.
Essay | Searching for Solomon Cohen
Own a piece of history! This was what the listing for the “Solomon Cohen House,” built in 1875, urged prospective buyers to do.
Poem | The Season When My Life Turned
I have been the first person awake in my house every morning of my life.
Fiction | The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land
Simcha was the man who sold air from the Holy Land, not to be confused with those unimaginative con artists who sold oil from the Oily Land or water from the Dead Sea.
Jewish Word | What a Schlep!
In 2008, a group of Jewish Democratic political operatives had an idea: If young Jewish voters traveled to Florida, they could convince their hesitant grandparents to vote for Barack Obama, thus ensuring a win in the vital swing state.
Talk of the Table | Meatballs Cursed by Jews
Among the pages of a medieval Middle Eastern cookbook lies a 600-year-old recipe with a title equal parts perplexing and alarming: “Meatballs Cursed by Jews.”
Memoir | A Secret Identity Revealed
Renowned international lawyer Allan Gerson writes about discovering his secret identity and uncovering his family’s past.
Ask the Rabbis | Does Absolute Evil Exist, and If So, What Does It Look Like Today?
Evil was introduced the moment God looked at Creation and “saw that it was good!” For the existence of good implies the existence of evil, just as big implies small and cold implies hot.
Book Review | Greed, Drugs and Philanthropy
In this time of corrective unnamings—to remove traces of admiration or gratitude for the morally reevaluated—the names of unrepentant slaveholders, Confederate generals, contemporary sexual predators and other assorted wrongdoers have been erased or proposed for erasure from college dorms, military bases, city streets and more.
Book Review | Waiting for the Messiah in Williamsburg
How did the Satmar Hasidim come to dominate the Brooklyn neighborhood known as Williamsburg?