Conservative Judaism: A Requiem
In 1971, 41 percent of American Jews were part of the Conservative movement. Today it's 18 percent and falling fast. What happened? Maybe its leaders never knew what Conservative Judaism was really about.
Forget Remembering
Rutu Modan’s graphic novel The Property explores the uneasy coexistence of love and death.
Hollywood and the Nazis
In their dealings with Germany in the 1930s, were Hollywood’s moguls just watching the bottom line or aiding the Third Reich’s PR machine?
Hollywood’s Anti-Nazi Spies
In 1934, Hollywood's Jewish moguls met secretly at the Hillcrest Country Club to hear an unusual pitch. A former ADL official was running a network of World War I veterans who had infiltrated the local Nazi organization. The intelligence was alarming, and he needed funding.
Kafka at Bedtime
Kafka continues to interest everyone from academics to Hasidic slam poets.
Kashrut and Kugel: Franz Rosenzweig’s “The Builders”
In 1923, Franz Rosenzweig wrote an open letter to Martin Buber on being bound by Jewish law in the modern age. Interestingly, he was just as concerned with minhag (custom) as halakha.
Letters, Winter 2014
Cyprus Bound, A Salter Exchange Between Readers, Time to Proselytize?
Pew’s Jews: Religion Is (Still) the Key
Who are the “Jews of no religion” in the much-discussed Pew Research Center's “A Portrait of Jewish Americans”? It’s a question that gets at the deep structures of Jewish life and the inadequacy of many of the sociological methods used to describe it.
Riding Leviathan: A New Wave of Israeli Genre Fiction
A new batch of Israeli fantasy books may not contain Narnias, but they pound on the wardrobe, rattling the scrolls inside.
Salsa and Sociology
When I was a child, eight or nine, I evolved a theory about different kinds of Jews, based, more or less, on the hot sauce we kept on our table.