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
Sephardi Lives: From Ottoman Salonica to Rosario, Argentina
Singing women spark indignation in Salonica, a change of seasons in Argentina requires rabbinic expertise, and Jews in the Ottoman army get fat and happy.
An Israelite with Egyptian Principles
Judah Benjamin was a brilliant New Orleans lawyer who became the most important cabinet member in Jefferson Davis’s Confederate government. He was, Senator Benjamin Wade correctly declared, one of the “Israelites with Egyptian principles.”
Dust-to-Dust Song
Nelly Sachs was 50 years old when she fled the Nazis with her mother in 1940. Few would have perdicted that she would receive the Nobel Prize for Literature twenty-six years later.
Robert Alter’s Bible: A Symposium
In the 14 years since he published the Five Books of Moses, Alter has steadily progressed through the Tanakh, producing translations that aim at something like a 21st-century American equivalent of what he has called the “simple yet grand” English of the King James Version, while attending closely to the literary techniques of the Hebrew text. We asked a learned, eclectic group of six critics to discuss the results.
