Ask the Rabbis | Do Jews Believe in Miracles?
“Jews have traditionally perceived everything as miraculous.”
“Jews have traditionally perceived everything as miraculous.”
As Devorah Halberstam, a prominent local activist, drives through Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood in her white 2017 Acura, she grows increasingly animated.
A few of our JPVP voters share their reflections on the state of America today.
Aron Wieder, a Satmar Hasid active in New York politics, finds himself in a complicated position.
One perk of working at a Jewish magazine is getting Jewish publications from all over the world in the office mail.
B.F. Pierce is a brilliantly developed, multifaceted character, perhaps best analyzed by M.A.S.H.’s Army psychiatrist, the Jewish Dr. Sydney Friedman (played by Alan Arbus). The doctor’s observation that “while anger turned inward becomes depression, anger turned sideways is Hawkeye Pierce.”
One day last spring, I got a call from a woman I didn’t know, asking if I objected—as she did—to a work of mine being included in The New Jewish Canon: Ideas and Debates 1980-2015 along with works by men identified as notable abusers by the #MeToo movement.
When COVID-19 reached Israel last March, I was not unduly worried.
In writing about the unspeakable mass atrocities targeting the Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims in the Xinjiang region of China, I’m reminded of the words of Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and conscience of humanity, that “silence in the face of evil is complicity with evil itself”—and that, as he would remind us again and again, “Indifference always means coming down on the side of the victimizer, never on the side of the victim.”
A Fortunate Man, dubbed in English, is long and dark and drags some. Still, it reminds us that—wherever in the Diaspora Jews have settled—there are among us people driven by altruism and a passion for social justice.
What’s in store for America and what can be done to strengthen our democracy? Join us for a post-election conversation on the state of our democracy with E.J. Dionne, syndicated columnist for the Washington Post and Robert Siegel, former NPR host of All Things Considered.
“For Arie, it was love at first sight when I entered the Zolla Lieberman Gallery on the near north side of Chicago in the spring of 1979. For me, it was the glowing images on the walls of the cavernous loft. Light reflected from aluminum extrusions upon a white canvas created an evanescent aura of rich pastel colors. I had to meet the creator.”