Mohammed Dajani Daoudi // Evolution of a Moderate
Once a radical Fatah leader, the Palestinian professor has come under fire for taking his students to Auschwitz to teach reconciliation. ...
Thursday, April 25, 2019
Jewish World
Book Review // A Bintel Brief
A heartfelt letter sent to a newspaper editor a century ago has long stayed with me. I happened upon it decades after it was written. With his soul in torment, a New York factory owner had turned to the editor for advice. He was not...
Jewish Word // Haredi
The term haredi comes from the Hebrew root meaning “to tremble” (hared) and a verse in Isaiah, in which God says, “But to this one I will look, to him who is humble and contrite of spirit, and who trembles at my word.” “Haredi really...
When Freedom Summer Came To Town
In 1964, The Jews of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and other southern towns didn’t always welcome their northern cousins or join the front lines of the civil rights movement...
How America Got Its (Bus) Wheels Back
The story of how discount curbside buses have transformed the nature of intercity travel. With a detour to rabbinical court. And a 15-minute rest stop....
Jewish Routes // Arizona
Defying stereotypes, early Jewish pioneers in Arizona were not just storeowners and bankers, but cowboys, lawmen, ranchers and entertainers. The first known Jewish settler was the German-born Nathan Benjamin Appel, who headed west in 1856 from New York to St. Louis, then followed the Santa...
Opinion // “I Want To Serve, But…”
Naomi Ragen Fear of ostracism—not lack of conviction—prevents some haredi men from enlisting. A day before the haredi “million man march” called to protest the new drafting of yeshiva students, I sat in my synagogue in Jerusalem’s German Colony as Rabbi Benny Lau got up to speak....
Opinion // Bans, Blacklists and Flyers, Oh My!
Letty Cottin Pogrebin As usual, the thought police are trying to silence diversity of opinion about Israel. I’m not usually prone to hysteria or hyperbole, but lately there’s a strong whiff of Jewish McCarthyism in the air—by which I mean attempts by powerful members of our community...
Book Review // The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe
The history of the Jews of Eastern Europe and Russia has a singular place in the Jewish imagination today. To some, it is a dead subject, poisoned by the Holocaust and the lethal anti-Semitism of the 19th and 20th centuries: Either we know everything we...
Book Review // Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution
Who was Rav Kook, the first chief rabbi of Jewish Palestine? Many have tried to understand this complex, charismatic scholar whose embrace of modernism existed side-by-side with strict traditionalism. How to explain his contradictory mixture of tolerance and orthodoxy, nationalism and universalism, mysticism and activism?...