Learning From the Swastika Epidemic of 1959
I feel oddly comforted by remembering that, while purveyors of anti-Jewish sentiments have always pressed their advantage during unsettled political times, they always vanish back into their netherworlds.
The Jewish Photographer of Ghetto Life
From 1940 to 1945, Ross was the official ghetto photographer, tasked with providing a picture of every prisoner. About 3,000 of his images survive.
Book Essay // Refracted Identities, Mirrored Lives
Suleiman’s new book, The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in 20th-Century France, explores Némirovsky’s tragic career and the deteriorating civil society of pre-World War II France that first nurtured the writer and then ultimately turned on her. Drawing on parallels to her own life, Suleiman makes of the story a meditation on allegiance, foreignness and assimilation—one with uncanny echoes for today’s politics.
Is Democracy Broken?
28 years ago political philosopher Francis Fukuyama famously declared “the end of history,”meaning that there would be “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” It was a heady time. The Berlin Wall was poised to fall…
Boublil & Schönberg: The French Duo Behind Two Broadway Megahits
The helicopter has landed—again. Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s musical behemoth Miss Saigon returns to Broadway this March after a 16-year hiatus.
Moment Fiction // Cuba
1936: He has been called “distinguished gentleman” and “filthy Jew”; the former is better, of course. Turn by turn he has been treated with civility or contempt.
The Delectable Dumpling Diaspora
Their seemingly modest appearance belies their multicultural significance, manifold incarnations and long history.
The Polish Republic of Untruth
It didn’t take long for the recently elected government to have a troubling impact on the state of the country’s democracy.
Jewish Word // Blood libel
In September, Josh Marshall of the online political news outlet Talking Points Memo reached for an unexpected metaphor to express his disgust at Donald Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric…
Top Ten Jewish Podcasts
If you don’t listen to a podcast (or eight), your coworker probably does—or your best friend, or your brother, or your grandma. Podcasts are the medium du jour, though the term itself—barely a decade old—is already a bit outdated.
Visual Moment // Odessa
“To this day I remember, feel, and love this town…I love this town because I grew up in it, was happy, melancholy, and dreamy in it. Passionately and singularly dreamy.”
Jewish Word // Bible
When biblical scholar Elsie Stern lectures about the ancient world at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, the first thing she does is hold up a Bible and tell her students, “For most of the first 3,000 years that these words were around, if you said ‘Bible,’ no one would have any idea what you were talking about.”