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.”
My Scandalous Rejection of Unorthodox
All of us in the online OTD community have gone through some version of the transformation Unorthodox dramatizes, and we gobble down and fiercely debate every new OTD memoir that hits the shelves, every documentary and movie that comes out.
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?
Indispensable Man
In his effort to cut David Ben-Gurion down to size, Tom Segev blames him for failures that were not his and gives him insufficient credit for his achievements. A closer examination of the historical record reveals a greater man than the one Segev attempts to dissect.
The War on History
"People have often asked me if something like the revisionist Israeli historiography to which I contributed in the late 1980s exists on the Palestinian side."
How Many Tears?
Which played a larger role in Jewish migrations: oppression or economics?
Faith in Princes
That FDR could have done more for the Jews in the Holocaust has long been known, but have we fully understood how much his inaction sprang from his own antisemitism?
Marx and the Jewish Fingerprint Question
Are there hints about Marx’s thoughts on Judaism in his writing, and if so, what do they say?