The Jewish World
Like Ladino, Haketiya grew out of the Spanish of Jews exiled from Spain. Like Yiddish, it has a range of loving, spiteful, sarcastic, ironic, anxious, and superstitious expressions.
What were 27,000 ḥaredi men doing in a sports arena in Philadelphia last week, and what does it reveal about their world?
Orthodox Jews on Instagram have become obsessed with baking key-shaped challah. Is the idea derived from a decidedly non-Orthodox source?
Insects may be welcome on European plates, but not kosher meat.
European hypocrisy on animal rights and ritual slaughter comes straight from an ancient Christian heresy.
As 2022 comes to a close, we’re looking back at some of our favorite stories from this year. Today, we focus on Israel, Jews across the world, and on contemporary politics.
The balance of power in the Jewish world is shifting to the ultra-Orthodox. Can conflict with the current establishment be avoided?
Frequent and outrageous use of Holocaust imagery is now part-and-parcel of Brazilian political dialogue. How did this happen, and why?
Two friends, a leading Catholic thinker and a leading American rabbi, pay tribute to the late chief rabbi, and his legacy both here and in Europe.
The majority of Israeli Jews, Lyn Julius points out in her book Uprooted, are not new to the Middle East—they were moved from one part of it to another.
A visit with an imam and a rabbi who together are attempting the impossible in Sweden’s most notoriously anti-Semitic city.
There’s an argument for leniency particularly in Israel, where the surrounding society naturally facilitates some form of ritual observance on the part of would-be Jews.
It’s all very well to be excited by the prospect of millions of new Jews. It’s something else to grasp that each already has a life that stands to be changed forever.
Unprecedented numbers of individuals with some historical connection to the Jewish people are seeking closer contact with it, and many are aspiring to join it.