The Gentile Jewess
Am I Gentile? Am I a Jewess? Both and neither. What am I? I am what I am.” Muriel Spark at 100.
Postcards from the Shoah
Stamps and the paper they traveled on create a historical record of the Holocaust, capturing, for instance, “the exact historical moment when one person reached out in desperation to another."
Searching for Ancient Passover in Samaria and Ethiopia
Bloody bucket brigades and white galoshes: Not everyone celebrates Passover with four cups and four questions. Rachel Scheinerman on Passover in Samaria and Ethiopia.
Moses, Aaron, and Pharaoh Walk into a Bar: Passover in the Union Army
Yankee ingenuity at Passover: how one regiment made a Seder in the midst of the Civil War.
Black Money
Terrorism is not cheap. Find a way of taking terrorists’ money, the logic would seem to dictate, and you may have a way of shutting them down.
Child of Occupation
Hidden in Modiano's explosive novellas is a desire for answers, a quest for understanding, perhaps even a search for identity, all of which becomes clearer as his writing matures and his methodical qualities rise to the surface.
Exodus and Consciousness
Who left Egypt ? And how did the Israelites experience God? Richard Friedman is a biblical detective, James Kugel is more of a literary anthropologist.
God’s Law in Human Hands
A Judean, a Stoic, a Jewish philosopher, a Jesus follower, and a rabbi walk into a seminar room at Yale, and Professor Christine Hayes asks them, “What do you mean when you say divine law?”
In (Partial) Defense of Doublethink
How does one survive psychologically under the control of chaotic evil? Take Evgenia Ginszburg, for example . . .
In the City of Killing
The Kishinev pogrom originated in a rumor, widely disseminated and believed around the area that Easter, that the imperial authorities had given permission for several days of uninterrupted violence against the Jews.