Crazy Rich Sephardim
For a time, Shanghai soared along with these unusual Ottoman Jewish émigrés, the Sassoons and the Kadoories.
The Professor and the Con Man
The saga of the papyrus that became famous as the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife began with an email sent to Karen King, a distinguished Harvard professor, in July 2010. The subject line read, simply, “Coptic gnostic gospels in my collection.”
Waltham Intellectuals
Stephen Whitfield’s group portrait of a large number of men and women of the Left who taught and studied at Brandeis from its inception at the end of the 1940s to the present is as attentive to the personalities of his subjects as it is to their ideas.
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.
Taking Responsibility: A Rejoinder
Between rabbinic rulings and public policy: a response from Daniel Goldman and Yossi Shain and a rejoinder from Yehoshua Pfeffer.
Haredim and COVID-19: Tenants or Landlords?
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.
The Law of the Baby
Mara Benjamin provides a deeply philosophical account, in loving, sometimes humorous detail, of what it is like to live under the Law of the Baby—and uses it, together with incisive readings of classical Jewish texts, to explore the nature of obligation in Judaism.