Interpreting the Peculiar Tenth Commandment
The Ten Commandments are appropriately easy to understand, except for Number Ten. ...
Wednesday, November 14, 2018
History Tag
In Hania, Crete—a Town With No Jewish Presence—a Synagogue Thrives
During the mid 19th century, the island’s Jewish population reached 900, but after much emigration, by World War II only around 300 Jews were left, all in Hania....
How Two Jewish Baseball Players Processed the 1972 Munich Massacre
They weren’t just Jews but Jewish athletes, going about their professional lives in a strange city, as the Israelis had been doing a day earlier. ...
Book Review | For Two Thousand Years by Mihail Sebastian
Iosef’s version of a “safe space” is a filthy, unheated Jewish dorm where students occasionally die of tuberculosis, or a lecture on a random topic in a hall where he can duck in and hide while running from his attackers—for a full five minutes, until...
The Lost Magic of the Wooden Pickle Barrel
Blond and rather slender for its type, a pickle barrel stands by the takeout counter of the famous Washington, DC delicatessen Wagshal’s. Lined with plastic, it may satisfy a certain nostalgia but amounts to no more than a storage unit on the bulk-bin grocery aisle—a...
Visual Moment | A Forgotten Ottoman Way Station
In late 2015 I lived in a 1970s-era camper in South Tel Aviv owned by a woman named Malka. The trailer is in a compound off Derech Ben Tsvi, the street that divides modern-day Tel Aviv from Jaffa, the southernmost and oldest part of the...
Jewish Word | Golem
Last September, during the final dramatic months of the U.S. presidential election, an exhibit on the golem opened at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Improbably, among the works of art and historic artifacts, the show included a baseball cap from the Trump presidential campaign stamped...
‘Broken Glass’ Shines at Theater J
Though a broken mirror foretells seven years of bad luck, Theater J’s production of Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass foreshadows nothing but promise from the riveting cast exquisitely directed by Aaron Posner. ...
What ‘Genius’ Gets Right—and Wrong—About the Jewish Einstein
In the popular imagination, Albert Einstein is a benign, whimsical and endearing old man. Yet of course, the real Einstein was more complex—though he was brilliant and had his fanciful quirks, in many ways he was also self-absorbed and careless, obsessive and absent-minded to the...
Free eBook: Defining Moments in Israeli History: 1967–2017
Which event most defined the last half-century of the Israeli experience?...