History & Ideas
Modern freedoms leave us wanting more. The author of our monthly essay joins us and a noted rabbi to talk about how conversion came to be an antidote to liberal restlessness.
Longing to leave liberalism behind, everyone from Catholics to Communists is experimenting with self-transformation. What’s fueling that desire, and is it strong enough to make the break?
Samuel Goldman and Ruth Wisse tackle Jewish attitudes toward free speech, social media, and the tendency of American Jews to support ideologies that harm the Jewish community.
Quite a few masculine and feminine Hebrew words, when pluralized, take the form of the opposite gender. Why?
Back in my teens, when I began reading and thinking about Zionism, I thought the founder of the movement was a snob. I was dead wrong.
The Jewish Soul: Classics of Yiddish Cinema, a recent collection from a major distributor, adds to the canon of Jewish movies in fascinating new ways.
A brief look at some of the many Jewish words relating to alcohol.
We know that the slur has something to do with Jews traveling in rural America in the first years of the 20th century. Do we know more than that?
Its meaning in the Bible is “Truly said!” or “So be it!” After that it acquired its intense liturgical emotion, and then hasn’t changed much since.
A newly translated memoir of the gulag should (but probably won’t) remind those who still flirt with Communism what exactly they’re endorsing.
Is There Any Reason the Last Digit of the Jewish Year and Last Digit of the Civil Year Are the Same?
From now until next September 6, we will be living in 5781 and 2021. Is that an accident, or is a deeper synchronicity at work?
A new book aims to dispel the idea of the divine chosenness of the Jews. In fact, it promotes a moralism as heavy-handed as that of the most simplistic preacher.
As tracked through the waxing and waning value of the Hebrew words for “departees” and “descenders.”
A young secular Viennese writer had an experience 125 years ago that would lead him to change Jewish history forever. He could never explain it. Can anyone else?
