History & Ideas
And how Jews used art to send messages about themselves.
Could “It’s easier to take the Jew out of exile than to take exile out of the Jew” and “You can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy” have shared roots?
Cheap and easy conspiracy theory from the past to the present.
A rivalry between the Jewish numerical and European pagan-astronomical nomenclatures for the seven-day week has played out over millennia across the world.
As America’s universities catch fire and its Jewish students grow more fearful, the field most likely to have something to say has remained silent—or worse. How did it go wrong?
Jews in Arab lands spoke much the same Arabic as their neighbors. But the notion that they thought of themselves as Arab Jews, pushed now in some circles, is a historical absurdity.
Technologies have radically changed religions in the past. But that doesn’t mean they’ll do so this time.
The story of “the nation’s greatest men’s tailor.”
Zionism, Communism, vegetarianism, and the “Ghandi of East Broadway.”
The possibility raised by the discovery of an intriguing inscription on an ancient column.
A visit to Joseph Roth’s hometown of Brody.
The great philosopher and jurist also wrote ten treatises of medicine. What ideas about human life do they contain?
In her latest short fiction, the great American Jewish writer retells the true story of Edgardo Mortara, a young Italian boy taken by the pope in 1858 and raised to become a priest.
Abraham Cahan’s still-relevant vision of America’s place in the world, and the Jews’ place in America.