History & Ideas

A newly released academic study hints as much.

Nov. 23 2022 12:01AM

And could the story of the Tower of Babel actually reflect a dim folk-memory of its breakup?

Nov. 9 2022 12:01AM

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.

Nov. 7 2022 12:01AM

A conversation about how small magazines develop and publish big Jewish ideas.

Oct. 21 2022 12:01AM

Focusing on America’s failures to save more Jews in the Holocaust unintentionally strengthens the forces that would threaten Jews today. Here’s how.

Oct. 13 2022 12:01AM

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.

Oct. 7 2022 12:01AM

What happens when the study of the humanities migrates from campus to the web?

Sept. 28 2022 12:01AM

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.

Sept. 17 2022 12:05AM

Jews were expected to transform their shtetl values, religious traditions, and bourgeois attitudes into muscular exemplars of humanity’s ideal, the New Soviet Man.

Sept. 12 2022 12:01AM

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.

Sept. 7 2022 12:01AM

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?

Sept. 2 2022 12:01AM

Mahmoud Abbas says that the Israelis committed “50 Holocausts” against the Palestinians. Why does he believe that, and what does the rest of the Arab world think about the Shoah?

Aug. 26 2022 12:01AM

The late historian’s memoir, an unstinting portrait of the unhappy collision of tradition and modernity in Lebanon in the years following World War II, is one of the best of our time.

Aug. 22 2022 12:01AM

The Israeli writer joined us last week to talk about growing up in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and the movie made about him and his father.

Aug. 16 2022 12:01AM