History & Ideas
The new leader of an important Washington think tank feels that cultural renewal is just as important as policy reform. Why does he think that and how does he intend to accomplish it?
The war and the danger to European Jewry brought with them a fervor that Jewish activists could only wish for these days.
A new book called The Origins of Judaism places the momentous occurrence much later in time than that proposed by most scholars. Is it right?
A newly released academic study hints as much.
And could the story of the Tower of Babel actually reflect a dim folk-memory of its breakup?
Shocked by World War I, American Jews turned to Zionism as a way to save their European brethren. Their support came at just the right moment to affect the course of Jewish history.
A conversation about how small magazines develop and publish big Jewish ideas.
Focusing on America’s failures to save more Jews in the Holocaust unintentionally strengthens the forces that would threaten Jews today. Here’s how.
The author of To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II joins us on the 60th anniversary of the meeting that changed the Christian world’s attitude toward the Jews.
What happens when the study of the humanities migrates from campus to the web?
A major tenet of rabbinic Judaism is that the Bible is not to be taken literally. But of course that’s not the whole story.
Jews were expected to transform their shtetl values, religious traditions, and bourgeois attitudes into muscular exemplars of humanity’s ideal, the New Soviet Man.
The word, like a small number of other Egyptian loanwords in the Bible, testifies to a period in which the early Israelite nation, or a part of it, was in intimate contact with Egyptian life.
This week, in Basel, the World Zionist Organization convened to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the First Zionist Congress. What was the original meeting like?
