History & Ideas
The Jewish philosopher heard in the silence of the Shoah’s victims a voice issuing a 614th commandment to the Jews. Was he right?
Despite extensive similarities, few readers have studied Genesis together with the Odyssey in hopes of illuminating the human condition. What lies waiting to be discovered?
The podcast covered everything from Israeli political challenges to Yiddish education controversies this year. This week, we feature excerpts from some of our favorites.
Four more of our writers pick several favorites each, featuring two Ruths, passengers, Lincoln, Verdun, chief rabbis, Jewish Montreal, sweet spots, a fortress, and more.
Five of our writers pick several favorites each, featuring a duke’s children, Jewish treasures, zealots and emancipators, revolts, dual allegiances, spies, and more.
The great Russian Jewish writer was caught between revolution and daily life, Bolsheviks and Jews, a desire to kill and an inability to pull the trigger. Did he ever choose?
In some cases, changes were minor. In others, Yiddish phrases were transformed nearly beyond recognition.
Israel’s founders made little of the declaration at the time. It took decades of work by figures of widely different political stripes to make it the towering document it is today.
The author of “The Eternal Return of Ethel Rosenberg” joins us for a discussion about his subject’s unending—and false—air of innocence.
And why each has been preferred in different times and places.
A professor of Jewish art finds himself turning from one explanation of a puzzling drawing found in an old manuscript to another—and then possibly back again.
The word is freighted with both theological and national meaning, which points not just to a semantic tension but to a permanent tension within Jewish identity itself.
A much-loved new biography argues that the convicted Soviet spy “betrayed no one.” How has the myth of her innocence become so untethered from the evidence of her guilt?
How a group of Jewish physicists helped the United States beat Nazi Germany in the race for nuclear weapons.
