Letters

Features

POLIN: A Light Unto the Nations

How is it that the largest public building to go up in Poland since that country regained its freedom, the first museum to tell the story of Poland from beginning to end, goes by the name of POLIN?

Reviews

Common Clay

Virtually nothing of Babylonian Jewry of the talmudic period, from the 3rd to the 6th century C.E., has survived beyond the Babylonian Talmud itself to help contextualize or confirm the many things the text tells its readers.

Silence of the Lambs

Sacrifice is both foreign and familiar. Actually sacrificing an animal is difficult to imagine, and yet we continue to speak freely of sacrifice in connection with political and moral obligations.

Revealer Revealed

Earlier this year, an email announcement of a publication made its rounds among scholars of Jewish studies. Written in the flowery Hebrew of the Eastern European Jewish Enlightenment, the advertisement proclaimed that the work would “reveal all secrets.”

Why the Germans?

Was Nazi hatred of the Jews driven by envy of their economic and social success or rather by a fear of a perceived threat to German culture and identity?

Shifting Sands

Shlomo Sand believes that nations are, in the nature of the case, modern inventions, and that Israel is a particularly bad one.

The Arts

Is Beauty Power?

With charm, business savvy, and determination Kracow-born Rubinstein transformed herself from Chaja to Helena to “Madame.”

Readings

Exchange

Thoroughly Modern Maimonides?: A Response

Kaplan writes that “one key statement . . . I would have liked to see Stern contend” with is “‘For only truth pleases God and only falsehood angers Him,’ [Guide 2:47] which implies that only truth, not the search for truth, is of value.”

Last Word

Past Issues