Is Beauty Power?
With charm, business savvy, and determination Kracow-born Rubinstein transformed herself from Chaja to Helena to “Madame.”
Letters, Winter 2015
With Friends Like These, Protective Edge, Cobwebs Cleared, & More
Mashed Potatoes and Meatloaf
From overly familiar ingredients, Joanna Hershon has concocted something that is both satisfying and unexpected.
POLIN: A Light Unto the Nations
How is it that the largest public building to go up in Poland since that country regained its freedom, the first museum to tell the story of Poland from beginning to end, goes by the name of POLIN?
Revealer Revealed
Earlier this year, an email announcement of a publication made its rounds among scholars of Jewish studies. Written in the flowery Hebrew of the Eastern European Jewish Enlightenment, the advertisement proclaimed that the work would “reveal all secrets.”
Shifting Sands
Shlomo Sand believes that nations are, in the nature of the case, modern inventions, and that Israel is a particularly bad one.
Silence of the Lambs
Sacrifice is both foreign and familiar. Actually sacrificing an animal is difficult to imagine, and yet we continue to speak freely of sacrifice in connection with political and moral obligations.
The Argumentative Jew
The most common understanding of disagreement, in the private sphere and the public one, is that it represents a failure.
Thoroughly Modern Maimonides?: A Rejoinder
To sharpen Stern’s point, we may say that the person who believes God literally gets angry metaphorically angers God.
Thoroughly Modern Maimonides?: A Response
Kaplan writes that “one key statement . . . I would have liked to see Stern contend” with is “‘For only truth pleases God and only falsehood angers Him,’ [Guide 2:47] which implies that only truth, not the search for truth, is of value.”