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?
Is Normalization Normal?
“Keep reminding yourself: This is not normal,” warned comedian John Oliver on Last Week Tonight. It was less than a week after Election Day, and the country was just beginning to process Donald Trump’s unexpected victory. Opponents of the president-elect were scrambling to discern what had changed in a world they thought they understood.
Book Review // Yitzhak Rabin: Soldier, Leader, Statesman
A double myth about Yitzhak Rabin has prevailed since his assassination in 1995. For the Israeli right, his peacemaking attempts were and still are evidence of traitorous subversion. For the Israeli left, and especially to much of the outside world, his memory is crowned with rare nobility.
The Best Books on World War I
On the anniversary of the United States' entrance into the war, here are some of the books marking the beginnings, the events of the Great War itself and some books on special areas of interest.
As Baseball Season Starts, Still Cheering for Team Israel
As the Major League Baseball season starts this week, some of us Jewish baseball fans are still reminiscing how well Team Israel did last month in the World Baseball Classic.
A Jewish Timeline of World War I
April 6, 1917 is the official date for America’s entry into World War I, and over the next 19 months, some 250,000 Jews served in the American armed forces. Through this timeline, explore some of their stories.
George Eliot Also Grappled With Feminism and Zionism
Just as Daniel Deronda probes the limits and possibilities for women in Victorian England, it addresses a different set of concerns regarding Jewish self-determination in Palestine.
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.
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...