Jenna Weissman Joselit
Haunted Heritage
We know what makes a house a mansion. What makes it Jewish?
Purim Illuminated
Queen Esther had a surprising hold on the seventeenth century Dutch imagination. A sumptuous new show at the Jewish Museum.
From Turban to Top Hat
Torah crowns, Chinese scrolls, portraits by John Singer Sargent, invaluable Hebrew manuscripts. What does the Sassoon treasure mean?
To Whom It May Concern: Mordecai Kaplan the Diarist
The father of Reconstructionist Judaism left behind a towering legacy, and seventy-seven years of personal Journals—a tightly scrawled window into his mind.
The First Lady of Zionism
At the age when most of us are just about to fold our tents, Henrietta Szold, pitched hers—and in the Holy Land, no less.
The Milchik Way
Katchor seems to take his cue from these menus with their meandering columns of dense text; their indirection parallels and feeds his own.
History with a Flourish
So much gets lost in translation—and to history—when household items, heavy with use, first assume the status of heirlooms and then land in museum vitrines, heralded as art rather than history.
Du Bois, the Warsaw Ghetto, and a Priestly Blessing
When the editors at Jewish Life asked the venerable civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois to speak about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, they had no idea that it would lead to a priestly blessing.
Ready to Wear
Textiles can tell the story of how modernity, for all its many blessings, often erases the practices and values of the collective, celebrating the individual at the expense of community and novelty or fashion at the expense of tradition.
Harlem on His Mind
Many Harlem churches that were once synagogues have been torn down to make way for apartment buildings with all the latest amenities.
Jewish Geography
The Jewish peddler, the “slave of the basket or the pack; then the lackey of the horse,” did not have an easy time of it.
Israel on the Hudson
An ambitious, new three-volume work attempts to tell the story of New York's Jews from the days of Peter Stuyvesant to the present.