From the Great War to the Cold War
The facts of Hans Kohn’s life are so extraordinary that it almost seems as if the first half of one remarkable figure’s biography had been spliced together with another’s in the second part.
Is Repentance Possible?
And should we add a confession on Yom Kippur “for the sin of opening browser windows of distraction”? On Aristotle’s akrasia and Maimonides’s teshuvah.
Joseph the Righteous
But on the very night in 1737 that Joseph Süss Oppenheimer’s patron suddenly passed away, he, “his servants, and many other court officials were arrested, and soon a special inquisition committee was convened in order to investigate the court Jew’s ‘atrocious crimes.’”
Journeys Without End
For some three decades Lionel and Diana Trilling shared a limelight that was not quite identical but never entirely separate.
Letters, Fall 2017
Toxic Brew, Open And Shut?, Grudge Match, and Fundamental Principles
Like an Echo of Silence
Lea Goldberg’s poetic voice didn’t project outward; it drew the reader in, inviting intimate conversation.
Patriotism and Its Discontents
While many Jews embraced the Russian revolutionary cause from the very beginning—four of the seven members of the first Bolshevik Politburo were Jews—the revolution did not embrace them for long.
Perish the Thought
Bruno Chaouat dares to ask whether, given the moral autism of so many of Theory’s luminaries when facing the basic political questions of our time, his own romance with it has been a similar waste.
Power and the Voice of Conscience: A Lost Radio Talk
On January 19, 1947 a young rabbi named Emil Fackenheim got behind a microphone to give a searing radio address about the Jewish refugees from Europe. He himself had been one only four years earlier.
Straying from the Fold?
Are typical Jewish converts ensnared in the nets of Protestant missionaries “swindlers, thieves, drunkards, whores, schlemiels, schlemazels, nudniks, and no-goodniks”?