Searching for Shanghai’s Jewish Food Scene
One of the less-celebrated benefits of globalization is that you can walk into a bakery in almost any city in the world on Friday and buy a challah. But not in Shanghai. At least not until this past March.
Book Review | The Origin of the Jews: The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age by Steven Weitzman
As the subtitle of the book says, we live in a rootless age. People everywhere, not just Jews, seek their roots, their ancestry, their genetic makeup. We yearn to discover who we are; alas, our tools are not always up to the task. But there is pleasure in the pursuit, and we should be grateful to Weitzman for being a reliable guide.
Book Review | The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East by Guy Laron
Guy Laron’s challenging new book, The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East, is well worth reading even though Laron, a lecturer in international relations at Hebrew University, focuses too much on the war’s international context and, at times, relies too heavily upon unsubstantiated speculation
Defining Moments in Israeli History
Which event most defined the last half-century of the Israeli experience?
Growing Up Trump
Trump has long resisted attempts to trace the roots of his character, but he does concede that he was very much shaped by his childhood.
Book Excerpt | ‘Who Will Lead Us?’
Like most of Polish Jewry, the Bobovers realized, perhaps too late, that what was happening in neighboring Germany would affect them profoundly.
Letter From Dahlonega
As far as Gary Jacobs* knows, he is the only Jew in his unincorporated community of fewer than 20 people near Georgia’s Tallulah River.
Opinion | The Trouble With Holiness
The “miraculous” victory of 1967 returned major holy places in Jerusalem and the West Bank to Jewish control, including the Temple Mount in the Old City (known as Haram al-Sharif to Muslims), the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem. This unexpected bounty, like other seemingly wondrous developments, actually fueled intense friction between Jews and Muslims. Sadly, the miracle of Israeli control of the holy places over 50 years has reduced the possibility of a peaceful solution to the wider conflict.
Einstein’s Hidden Spirituality
Biographers typically describe Einstein as a man who disdained Jewish rituals. But what if we have been given an incomplete picture of Einstein’s spirituality?
Book Review // Heretics
Leonardo Padura’s Heretics is a remarkable book. Padura, who is certainly the most prominent of a small number of Jewish Cuban authors, might also be the most famous writer in Cuba today. Best known in this country for his Inspector Mario Conde detective series…
Conservatives Admit Non-Jews—and No One Blinked
With only a few exceptions, the days are long gone when individuals are shunned by their communities and even disowned by their parents as a result of intermarriage.
The First Zionist Novel?
George Eliot’s ‘Daniel Deronda’ was written in 1876, 21 years before Theodor Herzl founded the Zionist movement—to the astonishment and delight of many contemporaries, and of many Jews ever since.