The Top 5 Books
We asked experts and aficionados to recommend their top five books on timely and intriguing subjects—from trends in American Judaism to Jewish romance....
Thursday, May 23, 2019
History Tag
In ‘209 rue Saint-Maur,’ Family Separation in Occupied France
209 rue Saint-Maur, Paris, 10ème—The Neighbours opens with shots of a Parisian tenement building as a mother tells her child the story of the three little pigs. The comforting voice-over drifts off as the mother pig tells her children that she cannot care for them...
Was Alexander Hamilton Jewish?
Since 2015, Porwancher has spent extensive time researching archives on Hamilton’s life and the possibility that he had a Jewish background. ...
Visual Moment | The Ringelblum Archive
Even before the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto (1940-1943) knew of the “Final Solution,” they understood that their story needed to be preserved. Under the leadership of Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum, a clandestine organization of about 60 researchers with the code name Oyneg Shabes (“the...
Jewish Word | Maven
“Maven” is a relatively new transplant into American English. Written references to the word begin to increase in the mid-1960s and continued to rise through the early 2000s, according to Google Ngrams, which charts words’ popularity in books over time....
Benjamin Franklin’s Midrash
Like fanfic authors today, Franklin extended a beloved text in a direction that fulfilled his vision of it, that satisfied his questions and fired his imagination. In other words, he wrote midrash....
Fifty Years Later, the Battle That Never Ended
The core idea behind that operation, and many others to follow, was the belief that we Israelis can solve our dispute with the Palestinians by first vanquishing them in the battlefield. If only we’ll be stronger militarily—if not morally—the problem will somehow solve itself. Of...
#MeToo, Said the Shulamite
The central figure of Song of Songs is an unnamed young woman, referred to variously including as “the Shulamite,” who asserts her sexual and emotional agency while others attempt to control her....
Politics, Propaganda and the Olympics Games
Politics and propaganda are inseparable from the Olympic spectacle—though perhaps never more patently than in Berlin in 1936. ...
Julius Rosenwald: Building Schools in the Jim Crow South
When Rosenwald decided to give away hundreds of thousands of dollars to mark his fiftieth birthday, Booker T. Washington encouraged him to donate a portion of the money to build schools for African American children in the segregated south. ...