Pop Toys and Power Politics: Israel and the Eurovision Song Contest
Eurovision is Israel's chance to shine on the world stage for something other than the Palestinian conflict, but Hamas and PIJ found the song contest an all-too-tempting target.
Instagramming the Holocaust
This Holocaust Memorial Day, an online project known as Eva’s Stories is uploading snippets of video every 30 minutes to the @eva.stories Instagram page.
Redemption in Catalonia and Bosnia: The Sarajevo Haggadah
What does the most celebrated haggadah in the world tell us about exile and redemption?
The Best Unicorn
Peter S. Beagle's classic fantasy novel The Last Unicorn perhaps betrays its Jewish bent with "idiosyncratic yet archetypal characters such as the hapless magician Schmendrick."
Waiting for Passover—and Revolution—in Venezuela
For the 6,000 Jews left in Venezuela, life is precarious. "...All three of us have been kidnapped," a chillingly relaxed young man at Hebraica Jewish Community Center tells me.
Shas: The Movie
If you think this Israeli election is raucous, travel back to 1984 and Shas's arrival on the political scene in the film The Unorthodox.
High Threshold
Visitors to the Hazon Ish's house would sometimes enter through the window; the venerable sage occasionally left home the same way. “A window,” the Hazon Ish reassuringly explained, “is in fact just a door with a high threshold.”
Lessons of the Soviet Jewish Exodus
Between the mid-1960s and 1991, more than two million Jews left the USSR. To the extent that the Soviet Jewish exodus is remembered, its lessons are misunderstood.
Letters, Spring 2019
Lachrymose Criticism?, Was Lincoln Jewish?, The Rebbe and the Professor, and The Transjordan Question
Nobody Expects
I mug at myself in the mirror and recite the old Monty Python gag.