Arts & Culture
From its priceless collection of artworks, a foremost cultural institution has harvested mainly inferior examples for display, while submerging Jewish identity in a sea of “universal values.”
Not packaged, not square, not oven-baked: that’s what it wasn’t. But what it was and where the name for it comes from is still something of a mystery.
A few months ago, I was approached with a request to become involved in a then-secret mission: to examine one of the very few high-medieval Haggadahs still in private hands.
When he learned just how much power the likes of Richard Dawkins had amassed, the writer Scott Shay decided to fight back.
A posthumous collection edited by his son Daniel clarifies the great columnist’s legacy to American, and to Jewish, discourse.
The anxiety of criticism.
Post-Holocaust towns populated by biblical ghosts.
Contention was so much a part of modern Yiddish culture that, in any study of that culture, it was all but taken for granted.
Take, for instance, the word tararam, meaning—what else?—“fuss” or “hullabaloo.”
An apartment is emptied of its possessions—and suddenly filled with life.
Wandering Jewesses.
Civilization’s weather vane.
“I want you to know that I leave Israel a different man than when I arrived.”
