Posts
The Adjectival Liberal and The Kingship of God
Michael Walzer is one of our great defenders of liberal democracy, but does his vision exclude religious Jews?
Kidnapped!
When Ruth Blau met with Khomeini to secure the safety of Iranian Jews, it was only the latest extraordinary meeting for the fifty-seven year old Resistance spy turned convert turned kidnapper turned anti-Zionist turned Israeli agent.
Ruthless Cosmopolitans
Susan Sontag kept saying hello to George Steiner, louder and louder, as he stared out the bus window refusing to answer. More or less standard behavior for both of them . . .
Blessing and Rebuke
Orphaned and imprisoned by the Nazis, while never ceasing as a poet, Paul Celan knew what it was to sing “above, O above / the thorn.”
Memory and Terror
How does a survivor of an infamous hijacking piece together her history?
Intrigues and Tzuris
Have you seen the one about the Hasidic jewelers and the Albanian goons?
My Path in Jewish Studies: Memoirs of a Counter-Historian
When David Biale told Gershom Scholem that he wanted to work on the history of Jewish sexuality, the great sage of Jerusalem responded, "That's not a field!"
The Integralists and Us
A Jewish colleague once asked Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule, “In a fully Catholic polity, the sort you would like to bring about, what would happen to me, a Jew”? “Nothing bad,” Vermeule replied. OK, let’s see.
Dateline Zion
"Jewish law does not go forth from London, and so rabbinic authorities have long attempted to define a Jewish date line."
“I am an Object Loved by God”: Rereading Clarice Lispector
The great Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector rarely acknowledged her own Jewishness but when the Jornal do Brasil fired her a few days after the Yom Kippur War broke out, something changed.