State, Power, Religious Control: How COVID-19 Raises New Political Questions: An Exchange
Between rabbinic rulings and public policy: a response from Daniel Goldman and Yossi Shain and a rejoinder from Yehoshua Pfeffer.
Family Secrets
“We beam with pleasure. We are in a place where our name is known. For both of us, this is astonishing. An absolute first.”
Ruth Gavison, 1945–2020
A leading Israeli legal scholar, public intellectual, and founding JRB editorial board member has passed away. Allan Arkush remembers her.
Camp Mountain Lake, 1977
The picture-taking began when he was still a little kid, at Camp Mountain Lake in North Carolina. The owners of the camp remember a chubby kid, not very athletic, and the camera was a way of making friends.
Friendship in the Fields of Moab
Naomi and Ruth have mourned together and are now setting off on the 50-mile journey from the plains of Moab to Bethlehem, toward an uncertain future—alone but side by side.
Could It Have Happened Here? The Implausible Plotting of The Plot Against America
Was America in 1940 primed for an antisemitic leader, as Roth and his adapters would have us believe?
Beauty within Beauty: How Lag BaOmer Stopped a Plague
“One cannot, says Hasidism, have to do essentially with God if one does not have to do essentially with men.”
Maimonides and Medinat Yisrael
Moses Maimonides may have left the Land of Israel for Egypt, but his thoughts on the messianic future are still relevant to the modern Zionist project.
Ivan the Terrible?
A new miniseries from Netflix manages to maintain the tension of the long-decided, if not entirely resolved, case of John Demjanjuk.
Touch: Passover under COVID-19
It makes sense not to touch during a pandemic. But did we truly touch before it and will we after?