Rediscovering and Restoring Cape Verde’s Jewish Heritage
Four large and heavy commemorative bronze plaques wait in storage at the Praia airport in Cape Verde, an archipelago of ten tiny islands 300 miles off the coast of Senegal in West Africa.
The Weird and Wondrous World of Jews and Magic
The first time I came face-to-face with Jewish magic was when I moved to Israel in my early 20s. It was the fall of 1995...
The Not-So Lost Cause of Moses Ezekiel
The Jewish Sculptor’s Confederate Statues Have Become a Beacon for White Supremacists.
Author Interview | Alfred Moses
When Alfred Moses, an attorney and prominent national Jewish leader, traveled behind the Iron Curtain to Romania in 1976, the impoverished country was under the thumb of the ruthless and corrupt dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. The trip changed Moses’s life, inspiring him to fight for the freedom of Romania’s Jews.
Can One Man Redeem Jimmy Carter?
Eizenstat’s main thesis, that Jimmy Carter’s presidency was one of the most consequential in modern history, might raise a few eyebrows.
Book Review | President Carter
After Jimmy Carter became president, he moved beyond long and firm support for Israel rooted in his belief in biblical Christianity to sympathy and support for the Palestinians and other Arabs, according to his top adviser in those years.
The Top 5 Books
We asked experts and aficionados to recommend their top five books on timely and intriguing subjects—from trends in American Judaism to Jewish romance.
In ‘209 rue Saint-Maur,’ Family Separation in Occupied France
209 rue Saint-Maur, Paris, 10ème—The Neighbours opens with shots of a Parisian tenement building as a mother tells her child the story of the three little pigs. The comforting voice-over drifts off as the mother pig tells her children that she cannot care for them any longer, foreshadowing themes of separation, struggle, threat and terror that are still relevant today.
Was Alexander Hamilton Jewish?
Since 2015, Porwancher has spent extensive time researching archives on Hamilton’s life and the possibility that he had a Jewish background.
Visual Moment | The Ringelblum Archive
Even before the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto (1940-1943) knew of the “Final Solution,” they understood that their story needed to be preserved. Under the...
Jewish Word | Maven
“Maven” is a relatively new transplant into American English. Written references to the word begin to increase in the mid-1960s and continued to rise through the early 2000s, according to Google Ngrams, which charts words’ popularity in books over time.
Benjamin Franklin’s Midrash
Like fanfic authors today, Franklin extended a beloved text in a direction that fulfilled his vision of it, that satisfied his questions and fired his imagination. In other words, he wrote midrash.