2nd Annual Conference Companion
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Welcome to Our 2nd Annual Conference
A Mechitza, the Mufti, and the Beginnings of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
By: Allan Arkush
In his latest book, Hillel Cohen offers an analysis of the Arab-Jewish violence of 1929 that goes very much against the grain of the usual Zionist narrative and even the non-partisan historical research concerning this period.
The Jewish Turn of Norman Podhoretz
By: Eric Cohen
Thomas L. Jeffers’ biography of Norman Podhoretz charts his rise from a young voice of the anti-Communist left to a leading neoconservative and American Zionist.
At the Threshold of Forgiveness: A Study of Law and Narrative in the Talmud
By: Moshe Halbertal
In the season of repentance, it is not only the laws of the rabbis, but their stories as well, that teach us how—and how not—to forgive.
Wonder and Indignation: Abraham’s Uneasy Faith
By: Shai Held
A famous midrash describes Abraham’s encounter with an illuminated palace, or was it a burning palace?
The Vanishing Point
By: Dara Horn
An exhibit explores the vanished world and unseen photographs of Roman Vishniac.
A Spy’s Life
By: Amy Newman Smith
Sylvia Rafael: The Life and Death of a Mossad Spy opens not with an intrepid secret agent about to pull o a bold maneuver, as books with such titles usually do, but with nine men gathered around a table in 1977, studying a picture of an Israeli agent.
Irving Kristol, Edmund Burke, and the Rabbis
By: Meir Soloveichik
Irving Kristol started off as a neo-Trotskyite and famously became the “godfather of neoconservatism.” But his idiosyncratic “neo-Orthodoxy” lasted a lifetime.
Discrimination and Identity in London: The Jewish Free School Case
How Britain’s highest court misunderstands Judaism.
The Argumentative Jew
By: Leon Wieseltier
The Jewish tradition is a long and great challenge to the consensualist mentality.
Coming with a Lampoon
By: Ruth R. Wisse
Jacobson is a world master of the art of disturbing comedy and each new work of his advances the genre—his novel J by a giant step.
How the Baby Got Its Philtrum
By: Abraham Socher
The idea of learning as a recovery of what we once possessed is what makes Bogart’s bubbe mayse, and ours, so memorable: We can all touch that little hollow and feel the impress of forgotten knowledge.
Suggested Reading
Sitting with Shylock on Yom Kippur
The poet Heinrich Heine imagined the merchant of Venice attending Neilah, the final service of Yom Kippur, but I find him earlier in the day, at Mincha, and we are listening together to the story of another Jew among Gentiles, bitter at being compelled to show mercy.
The Romance and Rage of Rashbi
In the technical halakhic sense, Lag BaOmer is not really a festival, and it is not attested to in any of the classical sources. So how did the Hilula de-Rashbi, as the Meron Lag BaOmer celebration is called, become such a large, and largely Hasidic, pilgrimage—and rave?
Babel’s Transcendent Mistakes
When I was 12, my parents bought me a gigantic Yiddish-Russian dictionary. Maybe this was their way of compensating for the fact that they had not told me I was Jewish until second grade, when I came home singing a Ukrainian ditty with the word “zhid.”
Where Abraham Walked
Preserved for centuries by Syrian Christians, spoken-Aramaic is now breathing its last.
