In 1966 a diminutive man, a large black kippah perched on his head, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. His acceptance speech, delivered in the lilting cadences of his native Galicia, brimmed with allusions to holy texts, conjuring up an evanescent aura of piety and sacred longings.  Yet underneath that kippah, and vibrating in the spaces between the ancient Hebrew words, was one of the most cunning minds and radical pens in Jewish literary history.

Born Shmuel Yosef Czazkes in the town of Buczcacz, S. Y. Agnon, who died 40 years ago today at the age of eighty-one, moved to Palestine in 1908. Four years later, not quite suited to the pioneering milieu, he left for Berlin, in whose culturally vibrant atmosphere he thrived. In 1924, a fire having destroyed his home, library, and manuscripts, he headed back to Jerusalem; again his home would be destroyed, this time in the Arab riots of 1929. Rebuilding, he kept up a stream of novels, stories, and sketches. A visit to his native Buczacz in 1930 was the basis for a haunting masterpiece, A Guest for the Night (1937), considered his greatest novel alongside Only Yesterday (1945), a panorama of early 20th-century Palestine. Agnon's lifetime productivity continued unabated until his death; his posthumous output may have been every bit as large.  

Agnon mined the whole of Jewish literature, sacred and secular alike, and all the world literature he could find, to forge the deceptively traditional idiom with which he created his unique imaginative world. His pages mix deadly realism with haunting fantasy, humor with anguish, nostalgic  lyricism with bitter irony and social critique with spiritual ecstasy. His portraits of traditional Jewish society are as merciless as they are loving; his observations of his own time and place cut to the quick. 

The fabulist was also a chronicler. Like his Hebrew predecessors H.N. Bialik and Micha Berdyczewski, he eventually turned to anthologizing. In that medium, writing in his distinctive style, he would preserve the vast legacy he had himself inherited and bequeath to future readers (and writers) the textual resources with which to follow him. In perhaps his greatest such compilation, The City and the Fullness Thereof, he returned once again to Buczacz, preserving in language a world now irretrievably gutted and lost. 

Ta'anit Esther, the traditional fast day preceding Purim, will be observed tomorrow. In recent years it has been designated as an international day of study, reflection, and calls to action on behalf of agunot, literally "anchored" or "bound" women. 

In biblical and talmudic law, a marriage is dissolved upon certain proof of a spouse's death or upon the granting of a divorce (get) at the husband's discretion. Each of these halakhic requirements can leave a woman languishing for years, tortured either by her husband's uncertain fate or by his malicious will. Though technically the term agunah is reserved for the former condition, it has also come to stand for the latter.

The suffering these laws can cause was recognized by the Mishnah and Talmud themselves, which created exceptions and allowed for compelling a recalcitrant husband to grant divorce. Leading rabbis offered whatever leniencies they could, and reputations were often made on an agile jurist's ability to free an agunah from her chains. Yet the essential requirements of halakhah remained in place, in fatal collision with basic, God-given instincts of justice and compassion.

In modern times, these legal strictures came to be felt all the more acutely as, thanks to economic and political pressures, men were on the move in unheard-of numbers, and as traditional communal authority waned along with its ability to sanction wayward or missing husbands. Writers dramatically depicted the agunah's plight as a powerful indictment of traditional society; women themselves became increasingly resistant to the demands of the law. Yet still the requirements held.

In contemporary Israel, where marriage and divorce are in the hands of the chief rabbinate, the often extreme stringency of the ultra-Orthodox has engendered new waves of protest and criticism, but also innovative measures to deal with the problem. These include prenuptial agreements proposed by moderate rabbis working with women scholars of the law. A resolution of the agunah problem, once and for all, may be the ultimate test of halakhah's ability to find, or recover, its moral voice.

In depressingly familiar fashion, another charismatic rabbi is at the center of a scandal involving alleged sexual improprieties. The figure in question, Mordechai Elon, is the scion of a distinguished family who has filled major roles in Israeli public life, directed leading yeshivot and a wide-reaching publishing program, and is revered by tens of thousands of followers. As he continues to assert his innocence, even his accusers take pains to recall his valuable achievements. Meanwhile, Israel's religious Zionists, the people to whom he matters most, are in shock.

Elon's swift fall from grace would have been impossible if not for the stature and integrity of the committee of fellow-rabbis and educators who brought his alleged deviations to light. Indeed, among the elements to this story, one is the increased willingness of the rabbinic fraternity to police itself (seen by some Israeli commentators, however, as an infringement on the prerogatives of law enforcement). Another is the growing candor with which sexuality is discussed in the Orthodox world. Still another, whose implications reach well beyond both Orthodoxy and the state of Israel, is the double-edged sword of charisma.

As many have attested, what makes charisma so powerful—its ability to move and inspire by sheer presence, unhindered by formal structures—is also what makes it so susceptible of abuse. These days, the door is further opened by the cult of subjectivity so central to contemporary experience. The best educators remind us that emotional arousal is no substitute for—at times may be the mortal enemy of—personal growth. But then, many of the best educators, like many of the best rabbis, are largely unknown and unsung.

How golden was the Jewish "Golden Age" of Spain: roughly, the 10th–11th centuries C.E.? In the era's once-popular reputation for Muslim-Christian-Jewish tolerance and coexistence (convivencia), it is increasingly easy to see an overused and overstated fiction; more and more, scholarship reveals just how conflicted a time it was, and how conditional was the "tolerance" extended to minority communities.

Still, for Jews as for others it truly was a period of amazing cultural creativity and accomplishment, all the more astonishing in light of convivencia's constraints. Under Muslim rule, the most innovative Jewish achievements lay in the realms of poetry and philosophy. Standing at the summit of both, and creating an intellectual synthesis all his own, was Yehuda Halevi (ca. 1075–1141). In a shimmering gem of a new book, the critic and translator Hillel Halkin has brought to life, with vibrant and personal immediacy, the passions, ideas, sensibilities, convictions—and the voice—of this emblematic Jewish spirit.

A galaxy of extraordinary Hebrew poets wrought the Golden Age literary revolution, yielding a bounty of new secular genres and religious sensibilities. But for lyric beauty, emotional resonance, spiritual power, and sheer memorability, Halevi stands out. No less indelible is his prose magnum opus, the Kuzari. Written in Arabic, and reworking medieval philosophy in a distinctively Jewish key, it asserted the world-historical significance of Jewish particularity and physical existence with a fresh—and still provocative—vehemence, and left its mark on Jewish thought for all time. As for Halevi's personal saga, complete with his late-life turn against Golden Age Andalusia, his perilous pilgrimage to the Land of Israel, and his mysterious death, it quickly became the stuff of myth and legend.

Our own period has seen renewed interest in Halevi, of which Halkin's book, coruscating and compulsively readable, is an undoubted masterwork. It has also witnessed vigorous debates over his legacy. Was he a cosmopolitan humanist? A solitary mystic? The quintessential assimilated Jew? A proto-Zionist? The first Jewish romantic? A dangerous chauvinist, even a fascist? Such debates mirror the fractured perspectives of modern Jews themselves. Reviewing each of them before advancing his own bold readings, Halkin brings home both the tantalizing elusiveness of Halevi's life and the vital pertinence of his example.

In the Hebrew calendar, Sunday February 21 is the seventh day of Adar, the date traditionally marking the death of Moses on Mount Nebo, overlooking Canaan, alone with God.

The Lord's personal oversight of Moses' interment, in a place "unknown to this day" (Deuteronomy 34:6), inspired the rabbis of the Talmud to praise the act of burying the dead with dignity as an expression of true (because unrecompensed) kindness and indeed of imitatio dei, the injunction to follow God's ways. So it is that the seventh day of Adar is designated by tradition to honor the institution of the Hevra Kadisha, the "holy society" whose members see to it that the dead are appropriately "purified" by being washed, clothed in shrouds, and bidden farewell with prayers and blessings.

While various Jewish burial practices date to antiquity, "holy societies" first took shape in the Middle Ages, but they did not assume organized form until the 17th century. Thanks in part to the growing influence of Kabbalah, Jews sought to turn the experiences of death and deathbed repentance—and, they hoped, eventual resurrection—into occasions for deeper union with God. This effort to spiritualize mortality would subsequently give way as modernity began increasingly to move the experience of death from the home and community to the institutionalized settings we know today. In the New World, the hevra kadisha, along with landsmanshaftn, served for a time as a means of keeping touch with an earlier, more intimate identity.

In our own age, many holy societies have fallen on hard times. In Israel they are mostly the province of the ultra-Orthodox; an offshoot, Zaka, has created a unique fusion between the religious and the military ethos.  By contrast, for some American Jews today, the hevra kadisha has come to exercise a renewed appeal as a meaningful mode of confronting the experience of death and mourning with an insistence on the divine image inscribed in the human person until the last.

Here we go again. Baroness Jenny Tonge of Britian's Liberal Democratic party called recently for a serious investigation of charges that Israeli rescue teams were in Haiti to harvest organs. In the ensuing firestorm, she has been removed from her role as "health spokesman" for her party in the House of Lords.

What is going on here? It is one thing for Hamas to fling about heinous lies. Among Western elites, "Israel-bashing" seems too thin an explanation for the mounting eruptions of lunatic forms of anti-Semitism, unhinged from even the most severe criticisms reasonable people might make of Israeli policies. Are we witnessing, as some suggest, a new genre of "postmodern conspiracy theory": a pathological inversion of Western self-criticism in which Jews, as ever, have been picked to play the key role? 

And what should be the response? Standing up to anti-Semitism and fighting it politically is the prime imperative; so, concomitantly, is a refusal to disengage from the struggle. For Jews and perhaps especially for Israelis, withdrawal into a cocoon of self-protective isolation, an abiding temptation, is a sure path to paralysis and moral disarmament. If the aim is to build or rebuild civil societies—an urgent necessity for Jews as for others—both Jewish historical experience and classical Jewish sources, in conversation with other political traditions, have much to offer. 

"Art for art's sake"—the idea that works of art must be judged solely on their own terms, apart from any considerations of moral, religious, or civic value—has by now become largely devoid of meaning, especially as so many artists openly hitch their work to one or another of today's political wagons. But with the lapsing of the polarities to which the phrase once gave rise, in particular those between art and religion, it has also become possible for newer generations of artists to turn their talents unapologetically to religious motifs. The results, as several recent exhibits suggest, are both intriguing and markedly uneven.

Reinventing Ritual, a show from last fall at the Jewish Museum of New York, featured an array of ritual items that simultaneously tried to function independently as objects of conceptual art. The very laboriousness of the effort to bring the two together, epitomized by the abstract categories under which the works were grouped—"Thinking," " Covering," "Absorbing," "Building"—indicates the difficulty many artists still have in capturing the immediacy and God-centeredness of religious ritual from the paralyzing self-consciousness of conceptual art (and, in many cases, contemporary politics).

By contrast, Judaica Twist, which recently opened at Tel Aviv's Beth Hatefutsoth, keeps a steady eye on the purpose of ritual objects, displaying an acute awareness of the need to fuse an object's aesthetic properties with its uses. As one critic noted, the exhibit thereby challenges a previously hardened distinction between "art" and "ritual," with consequences that in many instances are refreshingly well realized. The same may be true of at least the best of the 80 new seder plates shown last year at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco.

In the end, of course, the test of new design trends in Judaica will be whether they result in objects that Jews can actually use and learn from, weaving them into the whole fabric of their spiritual and communal lives.

Recent years have seen a surge of new Jewish communities: experiments in communal living like Moishe House, urban kibbutzim in Israel's inner cities, back-to-nature programs combining organic farming, kashrut, and "eco-justice," and, perhaps most notably, independent minyanim in the U.S., Israel, and elsewhere.  These last—communities focused principally or exclusively on prayer—shun not only the formality and organizational heft of most synagogues but also the labels and authority of denominational Judaism.  Some of the most prominent have been created by Orthodox Jews seeking to make room for greater participation by women; others comprise young people experimenting with their own forms of prayer and spiritual experience. 

New communities are themselves hardly new in Jewish history, some of whose deepest transformations were wrought by small groups translating their common understandings into the language of ideas and rituals. Such goups include the kabbalists of 16th-century Safed, memorably sketched by Solomon Schechter in his classic Studies in Judaism; the Ba'al Shem Tov and his disciples, the founders of Hasidism; and the earliest generations of kibbutzniks. Closer to our own time, the American havurah (fellowship) movement, sparked by the 1960s counterculture, would bequeath its name to a plethora of small-scale communities ranging today from highly traditional prayer cells to groups promoting social activism, sexual diversity, and chi gong but little or no prayer.

As these examples may suggest, the vitality of a new community doesn't last forever. Most, sooner or later, either institutionalize themselves, become marginal, or die out—until the next surge comes along. The question for all of them is the same as for established communities: what they will leave behind. Experience suggests that the answer is the same as well: everything depends on the intensity of their learning, the depth of their identification with the Jewish people, the faithfulness of their prayer.

Since the electrifying discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran in the late 1940's, the scholarly consensus has been that they were produced by the Essenes, a small Second Temple-era Jewish sect known to us from Josephus. Last year, a book by Rachel Elior, Memory and Oblivion: The Secret of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Hebrew), upended this seemingly settled issue by contending that, in fact, the Essenes never existed.

Elior's revolutionary thesis, argued with force and stridency, has been discussed in major mainstream publications from Israeli newspapers to Time magazine. But the controversy, and clashing assessments of her achievement as a historian, have obscured a more complicated and interesting history. As it happens, a minority of scholars has long held that the Dead Sea sect was actually a small community of Sadducees (or "Zadokites")—the priestly group associated with Temple ritual and given to biblical literalism—who had exiled themselves from Jerusalem in the wake of the Hasmonean takeover in the second century B.C.E.

This modern scholarly story begins in 1910, when Solomon Schechter published fragments that he had found in the Cairo Genizah and had identified as Sadduceean on the basis of their frequent references to the high priest Zadok and the "sons of Zadok." With the discoveries at the Dead Sea, Schechter's texts were seen also to make up part of the scroll known as the Damascus Rule; yet the majority of scholars, instead of being led to question the prevailing hypothesis about the monastic community at Qumran, concluded that the Damascus Rule, too, must have been the work of Essenes.  

Against that majority view, a handful of researchers, focusing less on the Scrolls' apocalyptic eschatology than on their teachings with regard to specific religious practices, continued to point to a Sadduceean connection. A pioneer proponent of this scholarly approach was Joseph Baumgarten of Baltimore (who himself was very far from repudiating the Essene association); since the 1970's, the figure most prominently associated with it has been New York University's Lawrence Schiffman. By the 1990's, their methodology had begun to win a number of well-informed adherents.  

Anyone visiting the isolated site of Qumran today will sense the difficulty involved in reconstructing a society that has been dead and buried for nearly 2,000 years, and the even greater difficulty of relating this relatively tiny community to the diverse, stratified, and fevered Jewish society of the time. What conclusions, one wonders, will future investigators draw about today's Jewish society based on archaeological findings at, say, the Carlebach Moshav, a crunchy-Orthodox cooperative farm outside Jerusalem?

Text updated and slightly revised on February 23, 2010.

The rediscovery—and recovery—of Eastern Europe are central elements in contemporary Jewish culture. Ultra-Orthodoxy tries to maintain versions of Eastern European dress, speech, and mores. The theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel, the melodies of Shlomo Carlebach, the sound of klezmer, the literary productions of authors as disparate as S.Y. Agnon and Jonathan Safran Foer: all in their distinct ways seek to find, in the murdered world of Eastern Europe, a source of living energy for the present. 

Not all succeed, and only the best display a grasp of the sheer complexity of the civilization they mean to retrieve and/or to reconstruct. In one impressive recent study, large swathes of Czarist-era Jewry turn out to have been far more integrated into Russian society than hitherto believed; in another, 19th-century hasidic masters emerge as politically much shrewder than their other-worldly image would suggest.   

Eastern Europe's past was being re-imagined well before the Holocaust. The heder, the one-room school denounced by 19th-century proponents of Enlightenment as a breeding ground of superstition and ignorance, was by the turn of the 20th century being eulogized by intellectuals who looked back upon it with a sense of irretrievable loss.  After the carnage of World War I, figures like S. An-sky set out to record a rapidly vanishing society. The founding in Vilna of YIVO in 1925 reflected a similar impetus to preserve and memorialize. After the incomparably greater devastation of World War II, YIVO reconstituted itself in New York; in 2008, it published a massive encyclopedia depicting the history of Eastern European Jewry in all its density, intricacy, and diversity.

YIVO's last days in pre-war Vilna were indelibly recorded by a then-young researcher, Lucy S. Dawidowicz, whose extraordinary memoir of that time and place was republished last year. Later to be known mainly as a historian of the Holocaust and of American Jewry, she was also a keen and lucid observer of Eastern Europe and the distortions that even loving memory can bring.

The celebrated French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy had some explaining to do this week when it emerged that  a philosopher he'd respectfully cited was a figment of somebody else's imagination.

Jewish history boasts its own roster of hoaxes and fabrications. Most famously, the Zohar, purportedly the teaching of talmudic mystics, was largely written in the 13th century. Another product of the Middle Ages was a pseudo-talmudic text imposing extraordinary stringencies on menstruating women.  In both cases, the authors clearly believed they were enunciating things that the ancients must have themselves believed. The authors of the Golem legend similarly believed that if Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, known as the Maharal, hadn't actually animated a clay figure in the late 16th century, he certainly could have.

Later times offer their own numerous examples. In 1793, Rabbi Saul Berlin published a supposed manuscript collection of responsa (legal rulings) by the great 13th-14th century halakhist Rabbi Asher ben Yechiel. The work was soon exposed as a forgery. Oddly, it is still cited at times as a normative source, either by those who have not caught up with its history or by those who have, but remain impressed by Berlin's erudition.

The most infamous modern rabbinic forger was Solomon Judah Friedlander, who in 1907 produced the text of a long-lost and long-sought tractate of the Jerusalem Talmud. Not until internal inconsistencies and Friedlander's own personal deceptions came to light were the work and its author relegated to the shadows. And then there was Abraham Firkovich (1786–1874):  champion of the Karaites, collector and steward of vast numbers of priceless manuscripts, forger of documents and tombstones.

These men were scholars in their own right. Why did they do it? Hunger for celebrity? Ideological zeal? We will never really know. Yet as a contemporary historian of scholarly forgery observes, forgers keep us on our toes, reminding us just how very modern is our insistence on literal accuracy and the distanced gaze of historical perspective.

In recent decades, "brain death," the cessation of all neurological activity, has increasingly supplanted cardiac-respiratory failure as the most widely accepted medical criterion of death. This definitional shift has helped mitigate the often ruinous toll on families of caring for patients whose hearts can be artificially kept beating in the absence of even the simplest brain function. It has also saved lives, by facilitating the process of preserving and donating organs for transplantation. 

Fundamental to Judaism is the idea that human beings are created in the divine image. This affirmation of human dignity finds practical expression in the thoroughgoing prohibition on murder and in the  traditional principles of pikuah nefesh, doing whatever it takes to save a life, and k'vod ha-met, respect for the integrity of the deceased. But when does death occur, and what happens when these values seem to conflict?

Brain-waves were unknown to the ancients. For the Talmud, one criterion of death is decapitation; other, more common signals are the cessation of breathing and movement, i.e., cardiac-respiratory failure. Moshe Sofer, the leading halakhic authority of the early 19th century, summed up the traditional criteria: "when a person lies still as a stone, with no discernible pulse, and then his respiration ceases, he is certainly dead."

Today's Jewish ethicists strive to honor these precedents as they work to balance medical advances with the inalienable value of individual life. The Reform and Conservative movements accept the criterion of brain death while hedging it with cautions and qualifications.  Orthodox authorities are divided: to Moshe Feinstein, irreversible brain failure, including the inability to breathe on one's own, is a proper criterion of death; to Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, present-day medical technology cannot yet determine irreversible brain failure with the certainty demanded by halakhah.

What makes humans, in the Psalmist's phrase, little less than divine? The beating of our hearts? The minds resting on our shoulders? For those treating the dead and the dying, those caring for them, and those struggling with the bioethical issues involved, such questions are hardly idle.  

"Of making many books there is no end." In the hands of the master bibliographer Moritz Steinschneider, a phenomenon that induced despair in the author of Ecclesiastes was converted into great science and even greater art. 

Steinschneider (1816–1907) lived through the 19th century and into the early decades of the 20th.  One of the founders of the academic study of Judaism before there were typewriters, let alone departments of Jewish studies, he took upon himself the gargantuan task of cataloguing the vast numbers of Hebrew and Judaic treasures, in print and manuscript, scattered throughout state, municipal, and university libraries of Europe.

His output was as staggering as it was painstakingly meticulous: fourteen hundred publications, including numerous thick volumes, not counting reviews and a voluminous (and often acerbic) correspondence. His bibliographies brought to light hitherto inaccessible genres and epochs, with countless works of mysticism, philosophy, poetry, history, and science taking their place on the bookshelf alongside the ever-dominant Talmud.  Together with other Jewish scholars of the time, he also played a foundational role in the modern study of Islam.

Memory has not been kind to Steinschneider, partly on account of the charge that he was less interested in living Judaism than, as he is once said to have quipped, in "giving the remains a decent burial."  It is true that he was no nationalist. But the vigor, passion and scholarly aspiration that drove his work was anything but funereal. As a burst of papers and conferences on the centenary of his death resoundingly confirms, his own living legacy continues to inspire today. 

Quite apart from the implications of China's growing influence in the global economy, China's politics, both domestic and foreign, clash directly with Western concerns in areas from democracy to the rights of individuals and minorities to (especially when it comes to Iran's race to acquire nuclear weapons) the security of Europe and the Middle East.  

China is also interested in the Jews. It has had diplomatic relations with Israel since 1992, and Jerusalem has risked Washington's displeasure to maintain its military ties with Beijing. And China's interest extends beyond Israel, to Jewish civilization as a whole. Chinese scholars and academics seek to understand Judaism as a religion. More strikingly, the booming sales of Why Jews Are So Successful, a recently translated volume, suggest that the mystique of Jewish wealth and power exercises a strong hold on the Chinese imagination.

The regime actively supports this curiosity. It has established a substantial research center in Harbin, where several waves of Russian-speaking Jewish refugees found refuge in the early 20th century; at several Chinese universities, Jewish studies is an expanding field. Even as Beijing steadfastly pursues its other economic and diplomatic interests in the Arab Middle East, not to mention its links with the Muslim world at large, the regime clearly hopes that "the Jews" will reciprocate its interest in Judaism by mobilizing their well-known lobby to help smooth its relationship with Washington.

How should "the Jews" respond? In the judgment of some scholars, real and fruitful affinities exist between the world's "two oldest civilizations." Be that as it may, a yawning gulf separates both Israel and Judaism from the powerfully repressive and expansionist brand of authoritarianism exemplified, and championed, by today's China. Whatever opportunities may exist for common ventures, the risks are commensurately grave.

Ever since Art Spiegelman's landmark Maus (1986), comics and graphic novels have established themselves as a new form of visual-cum-verbal midrash. The best of them, re-imagining texts and the events of history, point beyond themselves.

If Spiegelman paid tribute to his father, a survivor of the Holocaust, the hero of Joann Sfar's The Rabbi's Cat is witness to the vanished Jewish culture of Algiers. Other cartoonists have tackled the text of the Bible, as eloquent as it is famously laconic.  R. Crumb (of Fritz the Cat) has recently published his take on the Book of Genesis, rendered in his trademark mix of burlesque, Blake, and Beckett. The Comic Torah, playing the text—and itself—for both pathos and laughs, depicts God as a woman endlessly disappointed in love.  Departing from the genre's self-conscious impieties, Yonah Lavery in Talmud Comics injects a note of elegiac reverence into her delicate, gray-shaded treatments of rabbinic texts and figures.   

In a class by himself is the Israeli cartoonist Shay Charka. His Hebrew Babba series (named for the hapless, bulbous-nosed protagonist whose name is also the talmudic word for "gate") offers a verbal and visual romp through the Bible, the Talmud, the Zohar, Nahman of Bratzlav, and contemporary Israeli life. In another series, Over the Line, chronicling the experience of a religious West Bank settler like himself, Charka's alter ego informs an incredulous secular journalist that cartoonists are the most pious monotheists of all, since the essence of their craft is the shattering of idols.

This points to a difference between the new midrash and the old. The ancient rabbis were no slouches at kidding around, but for them the key lay finally in the text's infinite meaningfulness, rooted in its divine authorship. Even as intimations of a similar conviction, or of a desire for it, can be teased out of some contemporary midrashists, there's no denying the rip torn by modernity in the fabric of belief—or the price paid in the consequent loss of, paradoxically, creative freedom.

This morning, Israel's Supreme Court reconvenes on the matter of "mehadrin"  buses: public transportation in which women are expected, ostensibly on a voluntary basis, to enter from and sit in the back. The Court's hearing is in response to a decision earlier this week by the Transportation Ministry to grant formal recognition to such bus lines, several dozen of which now operate.

Powerful segments of the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) community argue that such segregation is the only way to insure appropriate modesty (tzni'ut) between the sexes. The degree to which Haredim in general agree with this position is not entirely clear, but the very notion is, to say the least, deeply at odds with contemporary non-Haredi sensibilities. Nor are matters helped by the verbal and sometimes physical attacks on women who choose not to conform.

Buses are only one front in the modesty campaign. In recent years, the Haredi establishment has been working to make its standards the norm in many public spaces, most notoriously at the Western Wall. Recently they have also tried to crack down on their own community's use of the Internet. Such moves are in part a reaction to the fact that Haredi women have become better educated, and more present in the workforce, than ever before. It is no less a reaction to the fact that Israeli society, once rather puritan in its public morals, has become markedly permissive, swamped with sex-driven advertising.

Which brings us back to modesty—an issue troubling other Israeli Jews as well, especially in the moderate streams of traditional religious Zionism. With growing numbers of religious youngsters being exposed to books and websites encouraging sexual experimentation, some educators are working to re-articulate the principle of tzni'ut as an ethical idea that challenges the puritans and the promiscuous alike. To be sure, such traditionalist voices are themselves sharply discordant with today's partisans of anything-goes sex, but at a minimum they may induce some wavering liberationists to think through their own first principles. 

A few days ago, Apple released yet another new device aimed at integrating words written, spoken, and seen, and freeing them from the limitations of time and space. It joins an array of other products making texts and audio-video materials available as never before.

Is anything being lost here? The Talmud declares: "Written words should not be spoken, and spoken words should not be written." What the rabbis specifically sought to impress on Jewish minds was the difference between the Written Torah, fixed, immutable, divine, and the constantly accreting commentaries known as the Oral Torah, spontaneous, dynamic, human yet also somehow partaking of the divine.

The distinction has proved hard to maintain. Though the Mishnah, the second-century law code, was first "published" orally, it was soon written down, and so, before long, was the vast rabbinic corpus surrounding it. The transcription of oral Torah created a Jewish culture drunk with the love of texts, first in manuscript and then, with the advent of movable type, in an explosion of print. Among the first works to be printed was the Talmud itself—in codices like those used for Roman law, with the text in the middle and commentaries along the sides. The result was a dazzling typography whose horizontal and vertical crosshatching perfectly fit the Talmud's own endless and exuberant cross-referencing, often said to prefigure the "hypertexts" of today.

Not all welcomed the development of mass printing and distribution, fearing that it would lower the bar of scholarship. Today, the blizzard of words, images, and sounds raises worries of a different sort. With attention fragmenting into increasingly narrow bits, the voice speaking to us, human or divine, recedes into a blurry distance. The Talmud says the Torah is "black fire written on white fire": an essence that neither devices nor websites, even as they afford unparalleled access, can ever capture.

The UN's Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead has taken on a life of its own. Late last week, Israel submitted its own official version of its military operations in Gaza, to which UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon is expected to respond today.  Within Israel, calls for an independent commission of inquiry have found a prominent ally in the state's outgoing attorney general. Meanwhile, Alan Dershowitz, alongside his substantive criticisms of the Goldstone Report, has denounced its author as a Jewish traitor.

Intentionally or not, the Report has become a powerful element in the mounting international campaign—warfare conducted as "lawfare"—to delegitimize Israel's very existence as a sovereign entity. And the implications go beyond Israel, which is hardly the only state bound by the norms of international law to find itself at war with non-state actors for whom the irrelevance of international law on the battlefield is matched only by its inestimable value as a weapon in global forums.   

For the Jewish community at large, the Goldstone affair may provide a highly unwelcome but necessary occasion to think, or think again, about the place of international law in world affairs. Jewish jurists were crucial to the creation of a system that, for figures like Raphael Lemkin, promised to safeguard Jews among others from the perils of powerlessness. One recent scholar has suggested that, even as they entered into commitments like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN's founders hardly intended to honor them.

Throughout the last half-century, Jewish organizations have worked, together and separately, to help create humane international institutions that would protect minority rights and vulnerable communities. How is today's generation to deal with the real-world activities of those institutions, and their all too palpable effects? The question is urgent.

If Israel's army was especially conspicuous during the early rescue and recovery efforts in Haiti, other Jewish agencies have been working on or behind the scenes as well. Among them is a coalition coordinated by the Joint Distribution Committee, the Jewish relief agency in continuous operation since World War I. According to the coalition's website, its Haiti-related work "demonstrates the age-old Jewish tradition of tikkun olam, or helping to repair the world."

The phrase tikkun olam is indeed age-old, but its traditional meaning is very far from present-day connotations. The term originally appears in the second-century Mishnah to denote a specific set of legal enactments serving the interests of civic equity. Later and more famously it occurs in the Aleynu prayer, calling upon God to "restore the world under the kingdom of heaven," i.e., in the service of God Himself. This more redemptive meaning took hold in the medieval kabbalah, where the concept of tikkun is aimed less at religious obedience, let alone at repairing the material world, than at spiritual transformation.

In recent decades, the term has been recruited as a short-hand designation for the social concerns and often the liberal politics central to many contemporary Jews. Clearly it offers a useful rubric for those otherwise indifferent to or disaffected from the stirrings of Jewish religion or nationhood. For others, it may bridge a perceived gap between the thought patterns of a God-infused tradition and the modern idea that societies are man-made entities perfectible through the exercise of moral idealism. 

To critics, the increasing currency of the term serves as so much window dressing for a politics that has nothing particularly Jewish about it. Others hold out the hope that the sentiment of tikkun olam might yet provide a vehicle of positive identity, if not solidarity. In the meantime, just like everybody else, and with or without advertising the fact, Jews of all kinds can continue to measure themselves by the good they do and the relief they bring to people in distress.

Yesterday, Shimon Peres delivered an address, in Hebrew, before the Bundestag as Germany and other nations marked International Holocaust Day, commemorating the date in 1945 when Soviet forces arrived at Auschwitz.  Israeli and American Jews conduct their own Holocaust remembrances in the spring, on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Ultra-Orthodox Jews, uneasy with the Zionist emphasis on force and resistance, hold their memorials on the tenth of Tevet, one of the traditional fast days for the destruction of the Temple.

In short, the Holocaust remains as open to interpretation, reinterpretation—and misunderstanding—as is the hole it blew through all the history and theology that preceded it. One historian argues that too exclusive a focus on Auschwitz has blurred our view of the vast killing fields of Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltics. Another has uncovered the story of the internment camps maintained by the fascist regime of Mussolini. Meanwhile, a guided catalog of the 35,000-page Warsaw Ghetto Archive has just been released in English.

Bringing memory into dialogue with the present is no simple task. Bringing it into dialogue with the past is not much easier. According to a recent book, too many Jewish historians are guilty of treating the Holocaust as a stand-alone event, to be studied in isolation from the course of Jewish history. If the charge is valid, the answer may be that such evasion is the only way not so much to highlight the uniqueness of the Holocaust as, paradoxically, to keep it from shadowing everything and everyone else.

Israel has a general immigration problem; it also has an aliyah problem, to use the tradition-honored term for the specifically Jewish act of "going up" to the Land. The two problems are not the same, though in many ways, as a conference this week underlined, they're related.  High-level economic opportunity of the kind that might attract large numbers of Western Jews doesn't exactly beckon. Meanwhile, the country's freedoms and porous borders make it an unregulated haven for hundreds of thousands of foreign non-Jewish laborers, legal and illegal, and declared asylum seekers from the world's trouble spots. 

For early Zionist thinkers like A.D. Gordon, national and cultural rebirth in a Jewish land was unthinkable without Jewish labor. Things are not quite working out as planned. And yet it is helpful to remember that even during the halcyon days of the early-20th-century immigration that brought Gordon, David Ben-Gurion, and other celebrated state-builders to Zion, most Jews streaming out of the Russian Pale of Settlement chose the U.S. over Palestine, and many olim left when they could not earn a living.

Today, the challenges derive from technology and globalization, the twin forces effacing boundaries and sending people, products, and ideas on the move as never before. So what is to be done? The Prime Minister has called for a fence along the country's southern borders. Questions of image and ethics aside, this is sensible enough; but a fence is not a comprehensive policy, and Israel has none. A recent analysis wisely suggests that the country should be tough in screening non-Jewish would-be immigrants, but generous in every pertinent respect to those it does allow in.

Tackling the aliyah problem will be trickier. Classical Zionist thinking has fallen on hard times, and so, for that matter, has the mystique if not the march of globalization. Both globalists and Zionists have work to do if, materially, morally, and spiritually, Israel is to remain the place on earth to which one ascends.

Civilizations come and go. Their greatest surviving creations remain. Such is the case with the work of Maimonides (1135–1204), a towering thinker, known to Jewish tradition as "the Great Eagle," who continues to defy easy characterization. Two new biographies depart from past treatments to situate the thought of this master philosopher within the Arabic civilization of his time, and more generally in the prism of the Mediterranean world.

To the late scholar Shlomo Dov Goitein, the Mediterranean was a gracious, cross-cultural society that reached its apotheosis in the person of Maimonides' son Abraham, a Jewish devotee of Sufism. To Maimonides' more recent biographers, it was a place less easily defined and more contentious: an open world, yes, but far from an always tolerant one, and the extraordinary creativity it brought forth was the product of struggle as well as synthesis.

Toward the end of his life, Maimonides, born in Muslim Spain but long resident in Egypt, sensed that the center of Jewish cultural gravity was shifting to northern Europe. He encouraged the translation of his Arabic-language works, preeminently the Guide of the Perplexed, into Hebrew so as to give them purchase beyond his Mediterranean horizons; even more widely and permanently influential than the Guide has been his code of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah, composed by him in a beautiful rabbinic Hebrew. These and others of his indelible works continue to engage and provoke Jews today in their own contentions with questions of faith and reason, of ethics and law, that never go away.

"This refers to the tefillin worn on the head," commented a first-century sage on a verse in Deuteronomy (28:10): "And all the peoples of the earth will see that you are called by God's name, and they will fear you." Fear is right. Last Thursday, the sight of a mild-mannered student wearing tefillin for his morning prayers terrified a U.S. Airways crew into an emergency landing. 

Tefillin, or, in ungainly English, phylacteries, strike a primal chord in those who wear them as in those who see them, and with reason. Tefillin physically enact the biblical injunction to make the words of Torah a sign written on the hand and a "frontlet" between the eyes. Miniature scrolls of verses from Scripture, each enclosed in a leather box and held by leather straps on the arm and head of the worshipper, they offer a powerful emblem of Judaism's yoking of spirituality with embodiment.

The practice of wearing tefillin has reflected and shaped currents of Jewish history. During the Second Temple period, observance of this biblical commandment emerged as a Jewish answer to Hellenistic amulets. In the late Middle Ages, a comment on tefillin in the Zohar sparked a centuries-long controversy over whether mysticism could be a basis for religious law. The 18th-century Gaon of Vilna, who enshrined Torah study as the supreme religious act, wore tefillin all day. So, closer to our time, did the lyrical mystic Rav Kook (1865–1935).  

Today, the Hasidic organization Chabad presses tefillin on male passers-by at street corners, while Jewish women, most though not all of them non-Orthodox, increasingly incorporate them into their religious practice. Undoubtedly, the source of tefillin's protean meaning and power lies in their very opacity. As a religious commandment and an exercise in mindfulness, a marker of identity and a provocation to others, they are indeed different, and at times a little strange. Just like the Jews who wear them.

"Rabbi Shimon said: make not your prayers a fixity, but a plea."  The inevitable tension in prayer between practice and passion, between communal structure and the lone voice, was certainly known to the biblical prophets and the rabbis of the Talmud. Yet today, the traditional prayers—profoundly communal and reflecting ancient ideas of monarchy, patriarchy, and retribution, sometimes in complicated Hebrew—seem alien to many. If the test of contemporary Judaism is whether it offers a compelling personal experience to "the Jew within," a common liturgy becomes more difficult to maintain than ever before.

And so, the project of renewing the Siddur—the Hebrew prayer book—beckons, if in different ways. Last year, Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the UK, published an affecting new edition and translation of the traditional Siddur. Just a few weeks ago, Israel's Masorti movement published a Siddur with a number of distinctly Israeli touches. The Internet's blend of the personal and the public has presented still another platform for new liturgies.

Paradoxically, today's liturgists might profit by taking a leaf from the medieval composers of liturgical verse (piyyut) who brought traditional prayer into dialogue with the poetics, and the events, of their time, honoring the ancient texts even as they re-imagined them.

Prayer has always come in many forms. The Talmud suggests at least three different ways of picturing the Song at the Sea (Exodus 15). Hannah's whispered entreaty (I Samuel 1) became a model for the Amidah, the centerpiece of the three daily prayer services. Moses' supplication for his sister—"Oh God, please heal her" (Numbers 12)—offers an enduringly eloquent standard of brevity and pathos. Recent scholarship into ancient prayer has begun to emphasize the physical as well as the textual—a useful hint to moderns that even the most elegant and updated liturgies will come to nothing without flesh-and-blood people at prayer, together and alone.

In a first for Israel's ultra-Orthodox parties, the Sephardi-dominated Shas party has joined the World Zionist Organization—another step on the road to becoming a fixed presence in the country's political landscape. Founded in the mid-1980's, Shas has long scrambled conventional categories. Although the party is avowedly haredi, and its leaders tend to imitate both the garb and the ideologically-mobilized politics of Ashkenazi haredim, most Shas voters conduct their lives in a non-haredi, if traditional, style.  As for attitudes toward the state, Shas politicians, unlike their more squeamish Ashkenazi counterparts, serve in the Israeli cabinet and, sometimes, in the IDF.

The success of Shas would be unimaginable without the party's spiritual leader, Ovadiah Yosef, a stupendously learned authority in Jewish religious law (halakha) with a rare common touch. As a halakhist, Rabbi Ovadiah merges unmistakable traditionalism with relative moderation on a number of fronts, from women's issues to the idea of trading land for peace. His political program is twofold: to place as great a Sephardi stamp as he can on Israeli public life in general and, for Sephardim in particular, to create a uniform body of halakha behind which all those represented by his party can march more confidently forward.

But Rabbi Ovadiah is nearing ninety. What will happen to Shas after his passing is anyone's guess.  

On Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI made his first visit to Rome's synagogue.  Clouding the occasion was the feeling among many that the Vatican has yet to make an honest reckoning with its conduct in World War II, a failure epitomized in the process under way to beatify Pius XII. Despite a papal visit to Israel and meetings with Jewish leaders, Benedict has seemed surprisingly maladroit in his dealings with the Jewish community. 

More is at work here than manners. For the Pope, a serious philosopher and intellectual, the truths of faith and the truths of reason are mutually reinforcing gifts of divine love. Speaking three years ago, he sought to foster a rapprochement between the two dispensations for the sake of rescuing Western society from moral relativism—and fortifying it in the mounting struggle with radical Islam. This same sense of looming struggle likely underpins his support of Catholic conservatives: he needs to secure his own ranks if he is to reassert the spiritual primacy of the Church as the means through which collective salvation is offered to the world. 

Paradoxically, the Pope's doctrine of collective salvation is explicitly modeled on Jewish peoplehood. He inherited it from his mentor Henri de Lubac who, like Benedict today, took public stands against anti-Semitism while also defending the Church's wartime behavior. Given these and other complications, it is unlikely that the cloud over Catholic-Jewish relations will lift anytime soon. Meanwhile, as two Orthodox rabbis remind us, there is much the Church can do to build on the good already accomplished.

Twenty-five centuries have passed since exiled Jews first wept for Zion by the waters of Babylon. Today only eight Jews are left in Iraq. Their story is not as well known as that of their European brethren, but in the Babylonian Talmud, for starters, Babylon-Iraq was home to the most influential post-biblical book in Jewish history. That it would become so was due to the Geonim, another extraordinary set of Iraqi rabbis who flourished in early Islamic times and whose most significant figure was Saadya ben Joseph (882/892–942).

After the Middle Ages, creativity extended outward as well, with Iraqi Jews founding other Jewish communities in India, Burma, and Shanghai. Not until 1941 did pogroms definitively shatter the peace of this cosmopolitan community, whose members would be largely expelled en masse after the establishment of the State of Israel.

Many of the books and records they left behind were secreted by Saddam Hussein's secret police, to be discovered, in terrible neglect, by the American army and taken to the U.S. for restoration. Today, even as some Iraqis go about razing Jewish tombs and pilgrimage sites, the state's national archivist wants these documents back, as reminders of his country's multiethnic past. A recent memoir by a Baghdadi-born Israeli scholar masterfully conjures up that past, and the distinctively Arab-Jewish identity it fostered.

A widely-circulated article points to the growing popularity of kosher food among non-Jews in the United States. In Europe, meanwhile, the campaign for animal welfare has revived old charges of Jewish carnality, and a number of countries have gone so far as to ban kosher slaughtering.  

Articulating both the meaning of kashrut and its many regulations has challenged Jewish thinkers, Maimonides among them, for millennia. Today, some Jews find in the tradition's dietary discipline an inspiration for a contemporary ethics of consumption. Others promote, alongside traditional strictures, a system of ethical certifications of kosher products. 

In the end, though, kashrut may be most about what it most seems to be: a biblically ordained and distinctively Jewish fellowship of the table in which family religious recipes set the tone even as all are welcome to join in.

Leah Goldberg, whose tender, compelling voice created its own register in modern Hebrew literature, died forty years ago today. The anniversary is being marked in Israeli newspapers and by the radio stations that for years have broadcast the music made of her poems.

Born into a Lithuanian Jewish family in 1911, she arrived in Tel Aviv in 1935; in 1952, she moved to Jerusalem, where she lived and taught until her death in 1970. Astoundingly prolific, she published—on top of ten collections of poetry—novels, plays, criticism, children's books, and diaries, and translated into Hebrew from seven different languages.  A number of her unpublished works have entered the public domain over recent years, two of them just this week.

With Natan Alterman and Avraham Shlonsky, Leah Goldberg was a leading figure of the so-called "second generation" of modern Hebrew poets. Unlike them, she eschewed politics and ideology, as well as extravagant symbolism. Her modernism expressed itself in a mix of formal poetics and conversational style, rich in allusions to Bible, mythology, and European classics, yet intimate and spare.  She especially made a space in Hebrew letters for the European landscapes left behind, and for a poetic imagination in which public concerns yielded pride of place to childhood, nature, and love. 

Debates over conversion to Judaism show no sign of abating, least of all in Israel. Last week, the legal adviser to the country's chief rabbinate declared that all conversions may retroactively be annulled at any time. In the ensuing firestorm of criticism, even some on the religious Right chimed in, especially those reflecting a historically more lenient Sephardi approach.

A great deal of institutional politics is involved here, including between the ultra-Orthodox in Israel and the Modern Orthodox in the United States; some of this came to light in the recent disgrace and resignation of an ultra-Orthodox foe of the moderates. But there is also genuine—if frequently no less bitter—conflict over principle. For the Orthodox in general, a key question is the place of the traditional requirement that a convert assume the often rigorous demands of Jewish law in their entirety. Is that requirement still necessary, and if so, what is its proper scope?

Is Jewishness a matter of belief, of belonging, of nationality, of religious practice, or of something else? The question, rendered ever more urgent by the quandaries of contemporary Jewish identity, is relevant not only in the Israeli context but (as a recent court case in Britain illustrates) to Diaspora Jews as well. It is perhaps relevant most all to that sizable number of individuals who actively seek to assume the burdens as well as the rewards of this fractious identity, each of whom has a story to tell.

Like the 2004 tsunami that devastated southeast Asia, yesterday's catastrophic earthquake in Haiti, a poverty-stricken country with a legacy of home-grown violence and suffering, inevitably provoked the terrible question: where was God?

One answer derives from Jewish religious sources, and specifically from the teachings of the Kabbalah. It has to do with tzimtzum, or contraction: that is, God's own contraction and limitation of Himself in order to make space for the finite—and invariably flawed—worlds of physical nature and human action. The idea was most famously developed in Safed, Palestine by the 16th-century kabbalist Isaac Luria as part of a complicated, esoteric myth of cataclysm, creation, and the direction of world history.

Despite its obscure origins, tzimtzum has proved surprisingly resonant to contemporary Jewish thinkers who find meaning in it for everything from organizational life to individual psychology. The very qualities that made it quasi-heretical in the 16th century—particularly its overturning of hallowed notions of divine providence and omnipotence—make it appealing today, including in attempts to explain otherwise inexplicable acts of mass evil or natural disaster.

And yet it was precisely in order to "justify the ways of God to man" that the idea of tzimtzum came into being, and there it will stand or fall. That, at least, was the view of the late philosopher Hans Jonas, and a similar view seems to underlie the German painter Anselm Kiefer's ambiguous rendering of the concept.

This may be an overly abstract or equivocal foundation on which to construct an argument for religious belief and practice. But in an age marked by scientific rationalism, a mistrust of hierarchy, and confusion begotten by historical trauma, a limited God may be all the God that some can bear.

The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), rightly known as a peerless master of psychological fiction, a fierce anti-socialist polemicist, an anti-romantic with a pulsingly romantic commitment to prophetic religion, and a dramatist of moral ideas without compare since the English poet John Milton, also happened to harbor an ugly fixation on the Jews.

This has posed something of a problem for celebrators of Dostoevsky's genius. Prominent among them is the American critic Joseph Frank, whose five-volume life of the novelist, a work decades in the making and generally regarded as definitive, has now been capped by a one-volume condensation, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time. Frank is not alone in evading or tiptoeing around the problem of his hero's anti-Semitism, grudgingly acknowledging its presence but preferring to underplay its ubiquity or virulence, or to insist when pressed that, within the body of 19th-century Russian literature as a whole, Dostoevsky was "far from the worst offender."

The evidence, sometimes maniacal in its intensity, shows otherwise; it was gathered together and meticulously presented years ago by the American scholar David Goldstein. The only question is what honest admirers of Dostoevsky's artistry are to do with this evidence—the same question that has bedeviled admirers of the music of Richard Wagner, the poetry of T.S. Eliot, and the work of other indisputably major artists similarly disfigured by the world's oldest hatred.

A reviewer of Goldstein's 1981 book, concluding that "little can be said to exonerate" Dostoevsky, proposed the need to keep always in mind "the truth of Dostoevsky's own insight that ‘the greatest artists could be the worst scoundrels and that there was nothing incompatible between the two.'" Others may persist in wondering.

A masterwork of historical writing, The Jewish Wars by Yosef ben Matityahu, better known by his Roman name of Flavius Josephus (37–ca. 100 C.E.) is a massive and indispensable chronicle of Jewish fortunes from the Hasmonean Revolt in the second century B.C.E. through the destruction of the Temple and the fall of Masada in 73 C.E. It is also the autobiography of an extraordinary and extraordinarily conflicted man.

Military leader, historian, biblical interpreter, negotiator, diplomat, neither martyr nor traitor but something in-between, Josephus traversed a route from battlefield commander in the war against Rome to Roman citizen and favored beneficiary of imperial patronage. Two millennia later, his dilemmas and his flaws remain fresh and familiar. A new and much-praised Hebrew version of The Jewish Wars, a work first composed in Greek, bears its own marks of youthful longevity, its octogenarian translator having learned Greek in her forties and begun this great labor in her mid-seventies.

Josephus has been mined for centuries by readers hungry for knowledge of Second Temple Judaism, the failed Jewish revolt against Rome, and the historical backdrop to the emergence of Christianity. A large scholarly industry devotes itself to fact-checking him, a task made easier by advances in archeology and our knowledge of ancient history. Yet many questions still remain, one pregnant example being whether a passage about Jesus in his The Jewish Antiquities (93–4 C.E.) is authentic or a forgery. A festschrift in honor of the dean of contemporary Jewish Josephus scholars amply demonstrates the range of issues illuminated by The Wars, as well as the work still to be done.

For all its antiquity, The Wars still provokes us today. Was Josephus, as a leading reviewer of the Hebrew translation contends, a model for a proud Jewish nationalism wedded to political realism? Alternatively, should his military surrender to the Romans be seen as a shameful sellout? Or, in light of his later and lastingly vigorous defenses of his people and their civilization, should it be viewed in uncanny parallel to another legendary act of abandonment and reclamation by a rabbinic sage of the time?

Ever since the Second Commandment, with its prohibition of "images," Judaism has been an un-, or even anti-visual culture. Or so we are told. While there is some truth to this notion, it is a very limited truth. The realities—historical, philosophical, above all aesthetic—are much more complicated and much more interesting. After all, the Bible itself tells us that at Sinai the people "saw the voices."

Scholars have demonstrated the rich visual culture at work in Jewish history, as well as the role of the visual imagination in theology and mysticism—and in the daily experience of those for whom Judaism is "A Way of Being." And it is well known that Jews have richly participated in the making of modern art.

Art is not only a vehicle of expression, it is also a window onto the lives of its creators and its audience, offering metaphors and analogies relevant to other contexts. For one historian, Jewish institutional architecture provides a comment on communal values. For a student of Jewish thought, a deep dialogue can be seen between early-20th-century aesthetic theory and the work of prominent Jewish philosophers.

The recent theft and recovery of the sign Arbeit Macht Frei from the gate of Auschwitz, and the emotional responses elicited by the incident, drive home just how deeply embedded the Holocaust and its imagery remain in contemporary consciousness.

No doubt, this world-historical event will long continue to occupy a central place in human memory—along with, unfortunately, whatever permutations, distortions, and outright falsifications time will add to those that have already accumulated in the overheated political rhetoric of our own age. That is why, here and now, as we enter perhaps the final decade of the event's living memory, the issue of historical interpretation becomes especially acute.

The Auschwitz site itself draws more and more visitors, while the subject of Auschwitz gathers about it more and more arcane conspiracy theories. In Ukraine, the country's emerging national pantheon celebrates independence fighters whose wartime anti-Soviet activities went hand in hand with the murder of native Jews and Poles. Aged Nazis are among us still, awaiting justice. Even dead perpetrators can provoke—witness startling new revelations about a distinguished German musicologist who died a decade ago.

This last episode highlights yet another historical dimension of the Holocaust: the fatal attraction exercised by Nazism and Nazi anti-Semitism on esteemed scholars and intellectuals, including such figures as Mircea Eliade, Paul DeMan, and, most notoriously, the philosopher Martin Heidegger. As lurid biographical revelations pile up, how and to what degree should our growing familiarity with compromised or atrocious behavior adjust our view of the work of these figures of "tainted greatness," as a valuable collection of essays terms them?

International pressure is mounting on the Netanyahu government to freeze—and eventually remove—Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria. Simultaneously, a heated domestic debate is taking place within the national-religious (Dati Leumi) community over whether religious soldiers can, if push comes to shove, resist a government order to remove settlers from their homes.

The argument resonates most strongly in the "Hesder" yeshivot, higher-level schools whose students alternate periods of Talmud study with active military duty. Yesterday, the heads of Har Etzion, a flagship Hesder yeshiva, issued a strong statement against disobedience.

The issue is made more acute by the fact that so many religious soldiers themselves grew up in settlements. Not only that, but the national-religious camp increasingly fills the ranks of elite combat units and the IDF officer corps as a whole; indeed, the Hesder yeshivot are hotbeds of youthful idealism, and their internal debates are passionate.

Meanwhile, the children of secular elites increasingly gravitate toward non-combatant roles or choose not to enlist at all. Zeev Sternhell, a leading historian and secular public intellectual, recently offered a sterling example of how not to advance the discussion.

As for Jewish tradition, David Golinkin points out its ample precedents for heeding the call of conscience and higher law over and against even legitimate authority. Here as elsewhere, adapting that tradition to the relentless, complex demands of contemporary Jewish sovereignty is both difficult and necessary.

A prominent rabbi in Israel has landed in hot water with his Orthodox colleagues for referring to the historical Jesus, admiringly, as a "model rabbi."

This is not the first time that the American-born Shlomo Riskin, a long-time supporter of enhancing women's roles in Orthodoxy, has shown himself willing to push the religious envelope. Though he quickly qualified his reported remarks, this latest contretemps highlights not only internal debates within the rabbinic fraternity but also, more intriguingly, the changing shape of Jesus in the mind and imagination of contemporary Jews.

On both sides, indeed, the dramatic diminishment over recent decades in official Christian anti-Semitism—notwithstanding the current Pope's move to canonize his wartime predecessor Pius XII—has allowed for greater freedom to discuss the complex history of Jews' relationship to the Church and to Jesus. Two years ago, the Christian scholar Peter Schafer published a provocative study of the place of Jesus in the Talmud—a charged and sensitive subject; in the same year, the young Jewish scholar Matthew Hoffman brought out a volume on the appeal of Jesus to Eastern European Jews like the artist Marc Chagall and the Yiddish poet Jacob Glatstein.

American Jewish theologians, too, have found Jesus "good to think with" as they struggle to render their tradition and commitments meaningful to today's Jews.

Yet whether Jesus will ever be welcomed home one day as the ultimate Prodigal Son is, in the apt talmudic phrase, a matter for the messiah to decide.

Nine years ago, according to recent reports in the Israeli media, the head of the country's leading forensic institute admitted to having transplanted tissues and organs—corneas, skin, heart valves, and bones—from deceased Jews, Palestinians, and foreign workers. It seems that the families of the decedents, while consenting to autopsies, had not consented to transplants. The practice was halted and the physician dismissed from his post.

Old news, then. But the exact nature of the doctor's past actions, limited if clearly unethical, was lost in the furor aroused by the surfacing of this old news in late December. In Britain, the Guardian was almost exultant, reminding readers that only a few scant months earlier, Israel had denounced as an anti-Semitic "blood libel" the charge in a Swedish newspaper that its defense forces were deliberately murdering Palestinians for their body parts.

What is it about Jews and blood that elicits such overblown and ghoulish fascination? As Hillel Kieval explains, the blood libel is no mere throwback to the Middle Ages but remains as modern as modern science. To Jonathan Spyer, the blood libel is only one of the gross anti-Semitic canards revived in our time by Islamists and eagerly taken up by anti-Israel activists and intellectuals in the West. Some of the latter are Jews: witness a 2007 volume by an Israeli historian giving credence to the long-discredited blood libel itself.

Whatever this heinous slander may have represented in medieval Christendom, its resuscitation today attests to the lengths some are willing to go in order to anathematize the Jewish people.

In a narrow decision by the UK Supreme Court, an Orthodox school in London has been ruled in violation of the country's race-relations law for refusing admission to the son of a non-Orthodox convert. "The judges knew they were handling a hot potato," comments the author of a 2008 report on the future of Jewish schools in the UK, who reads the decision as an open invitation to Parliament to revisit and re-write a defective law. But alarm bells have been ringing loudly in the Jewish community ever since the case started its way through the lower courts; the columnist Melanie Phillips sees dire implications.

Behind the core issue in the decision lies a truly venerable trail of disputation. Are the Jews a religion, or a people? Although the biblical answer—they are both—could not be clearer, the sharper edges of this issue have been debated for centuries, especially in the European context where it formed a perennial crux for societies contemplating a grant of citizenship to their Jews. In England, as Michael Clark illuminates in a study of the first Jewish Members of Parliament, the nature of Anglo-Jewish identity remained ambiguous well into the late Victorian period.

According to the UK race-relations act, discrimination by religious institutions on religious grounds is acceptable; not so, discrimination on ethnic grounds. In the court's judgment, since religious status in Jewish law is defined not through tests of faith but through descent or conversion, the Orthodox school, by adhering to the traditional definition in its admissions procedures, was applying an "ethnic" and hence inadmissible criterion.

Triggering the court case was the fact that the child's mother had been converted to Judaism through the Conservative (Masorti) movement, whose procedures are not accepted by the office of the Orthodox chief rabbi. Thus, inevitably if needlessly, did matrilineal descent become another lump of contention in the legal and media stew. Here American Jews may feel on familiar ground, at least since the controversy aroused by the 1983 decision of the Reform movement to revise millennia-old understandings and accept the child of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother as a Jew. On this issue, Alexander Schindler and Lawrence Schiffman present opposing sides; Meir Soloveichik takes a fresh look.

The structure defiled by the pagan Greeks in the rabbinic story of the miracle of Hanukkah was a replacement building for the First (Solomon’s) Temple, destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E. The replacement was itself replaced by the magnificent Second Temple, completed by King Herod around 20 B.C.E. and in turn destroyed by the Romans 90 years later. By then, the centralized model of Temple worship with its sacrifices had already begun to be supplanted by prayer worship in small synagogues both inside and outside the Holy Land.

Although the precise architecture of Solomon’s Temple can only be guessed at, reconstructions of the Second Temple, both fanciful and scholarly, abound. The classicist Simon Goldhill describes at length the appearance of the Temple complex and its resonating significance in the imagination of the world, while a new and sumptuously illustrated volume delves deeply into the sources, the history, and the archaeology of the Temple and the Mount on which it stood.

Much scholarly attention has focused on the significance of the momentous transition from Temple to synagogue in Jewish religious consciousness. Lee I. Levine explores some of the early aspects.

In the Diaspora, medieval synagogue architecture from Kaifeng in China to Toledo in Spain followed prevailing local custom; the same is true of early-modern and modern synagogues everywhere. Among the earliest still-functioning European synagogues, Prague's Altneuschul (1275) and London's Bevis Marks Synagogue (1702) represent two very different types serving the common purpose of divine worship.

Among the holidays of the Jewish year, Hanukkah may surpass even Passover in the sheer number and variety of the songs devoted to recalling, retelling, and rejoicing in the events of the past and their evergreen message.

For American Jews of a certain age nostalgic for their childhood, Diane Ashton deftly surveys the English-language ditties of the 1950’s, from “Who Can Retell” to “I Had a Little Dreydl” and beyond. Today’s casual consumers have their pick of dozens of new CD’s in English, Yinglish, and Hebrew, folk, rock, and heavy metal, many of them rivaling the Christmas market for kitsch. But curious listeners and antiquarians are hardly without other resources.

From its files, the website of the Judaica Sound Archives unearths a Hanukkah miscellany by the once-famous basso Sidor Belarsky (1898–1975). The Jewish Music Research Centre of the Hebrew University offers a recording of Abraham Abuganim (1908–2002) performing a children’s Hanukkah song of his own composition, as well as a contemporary women’s choir singing the Hanukkah blessings in a 19th-century musical setting. Also in Hebrew is an entrancing 50-song medley from the pre-State period of Jewish Palestine.

Non-Jewish composers have turned a hand to Hanukkah as well. In the 18th century, Benedetto Marcello incorporated an Italian Jewish melody to Maoz Tzur in a setting for voice and instruments of Psalm 15; it was performed in November in Washington D.C. under the auspices of Pro Musica Hebraica. Better known by far is Georg Friedrich Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabaeus (1747), a thrilling reenactment in music of the struggle of the ancient Jews with their enemies.

“One day [Jews are] being completely segregated, [and the] next thing you know, Napoleon comes through town, tears down the ghetto gates, and we can do whatever we like, sort of.”

Thus the author Michael Goldfarb, describing the thesis of his recently published book, Emancipation. Especially in the cases of France and Germany, Goldfarb writes, there is no denying the profoundly liberating energies that were unleashed when the Jews, like a spring suddenly uncoiled, were enabled to join the larger societies in which they lived. Nor can there be any proper understanding of the larger course of modernity apart from this momentous development in history.

Reviewers have complained that Goldfarb’s picture is overdrawn and his thesis overargued. The degree to which Jews were segregated in pre-Emancipation Europe, they point out, varied from time to time and place to place; for the Jews themselves, emancipation itself never proved to be a smooth or cost-free process; and the backlash to emancipation on the part of European politicians and populaces could reach murderous heights of ferocity.

For the inside story of relationships between Jews and their Gentile environment in the springtime of Emancipation, the social historian Jacob Katz is a peerless guide. Although many (like Goldfarb) tend to regard the shifting modern attitudes toward the Jews in terms of a seesaw movement between two opposing forces—progressive enlightenment versus reactionary prejudice—Arthur Hertzberg in a landmark study shows how modern anti-Semitism in fact emerged not as a reaction to the Enlightenment but as an integral element in the thought of the great Enlighteners themselves.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, a professor of religion casts a gimlet eye at the widespread religious promiscuity in contemporary America. “Americans are swingers as well as switchers,” he writes, “flirting with religious beliefs and practices other than their own without officially changing their religious affiliation.” As more and more Americans “are now bellying up to . . . the ‘divine deli,’” the result is a “melting down [of] the sharp edges of the world's religions,” to the detriment of all parties.

Among American Jews, the best-known variant of the syncretistic syndrome is the “JewBu” phenomenon, a do-it-yourself hybrid of Judaism and Buddhism typified if not inspired by Rodger Kamenetz’s The Jew in the Lotus (1994) and celebrated in such lighter fare as That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Buddhist and Jewish Dharma.

The JewBu phenomenon is itself a subset of the meditation and “spirituality” movement that melds Eastern with Jewish sources and practices. A recent touchstone is Jay Michaelson’s God Is Everything, hailed as “timely and necessary” by the guru rabbi Zalman-Schachter Shalomi. An online review at the Jewish Week was respectful, but skeptical.

Whatever all this may portend for the future, David Gelernter, for one, has provided a powerful and no less “timely and necessary” defense of separateness as a bedrock principle of Judaism.

Controversy over the Obama administration’s proposed overhaul of American health care has dwelled in part on the issue of public subsidization of abortion. Although the bill passed by the House upheld the status quo and banned such subsidies—to the dismay of its liberal supporters—the subject has not faded from sight. Amid the turmoil, little attention has focused on the question of abortion itself, its moral and ethical status.

Is there a distinctive Jewish view of this matter? In practice, to judge by survey results and voting patterns, Jews hold the most permissive “pro-choice” views of any group in the American population, and many Jews tend to anchor those views in “Jewish teachings.”

Are they right? Daniel Schiff offers a careful introduction to the issue. A briefer survey by Barry Freundel, an Orthodox rabbi, suggests that Jewish teachings tend to run contrary to today's popular view. Perhaps surprisingly, Rabbi Elliott Dorff, a liberal spokesman for Conservative Judaism, comes to much the same conclusion. For an in-depth discussion of the classic texts, David Feldman’s 1968 volume remains indispensable.

For many American Jews, the approach of Hanukkah is a reminder of another miracle besides the one in Jerusalem two millennia ago: the miracle of their country, of the blessings it has showered on its Jewish citizens, and of its firm friendship with the state of Israel.

Steven Windmueller of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion has written a crisp summary of the American Jewish experience and of the factors that have made it the exceptional phenomenon it is. Also just released are a handful of essays focusing on the economic life of American Jews, a subject that has received surprisingly little attention by scholars. And, in keeping with the spirit of the topic, nothing could be more apropos than a Hanukkah song featuring lyrics by a U.S. Senator from Utah.

In Israel and the United States, high-level Talmud study thrives today with an intensity unmatched since the days of the great East European yeshivot. Yet to most English readers the Talmud, the essential Jewish compendium of legal and narrative discussion, remains a closed book—or rather 63 books. All the more reason, then, to welcome a new and expertly edited 900-page selection from the “sea of the Talmud.”

What if a dip into the ocean doesn’t suffice? Two English-language editions have come to the aid of the student unversed in the original languages or modes of rabbinic reasoning: a partial translation of a 47-volume Hebrew edition by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, who has also written a one-volume introduction to the Talmud, and a complete edition, the work of many hands, known as the Artscroll Schottenstein Talmud. Both are copiously annotated.

A number of book- and essay-length introductions can also be recommended.

Hanukkah, the eight-day holiday whose Hebrew dates are 25 Kislev - 2 Tevet, begins this year on the evening of December 11. It commemorates an ancient victory at once military, political, social, and religious. Militarily, the victory, which took place in Judea in 165 B.C.E., saw the routing of the forces of the Greek Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes by a rebel Jewish army under the leadership of Judah Maccabee. Politically, it ushered in a prolonged period of independent Jewish rule under the Hasmonean dynasty. Socially, it betokened the triumph of traditionalist Jews over the assimilating Hellenizers in their midst. Religiously, it was marked by the re-conversion of the great Temple in Jerusalem, which under the Hellenes had been turned into a place of pagan idolatry, to the worship of the One God of the Jews.

All over the world, Hanukkah today is celebrated in homes and synagogues by the lighting of lights that on successive nights increase in number from one to eight, by the reciting of special prayers and blessings, and by the singing of songs of praise to the Guardian of Israel Who delivered “the strong into the hands of the weak, the many into the hands of the few, the wicked into the hands of the righteous.” The nightly ceremony recalls the legendary act of divine intervention that caused a minute amount of purified oil, left behind by the marauding pagans, to burn for eight days in the reclaimed Temple menorah, whose history Daniel Sperber recounts.

The bitter contest between the Hebrews and the Greeks has spawned a large literature about the divergent “Hebraic” and “Hellenistic” perspectives on enduring issues of morality and theology. In time, Christian writers would adjoin key elements of “Hebraism” to their own faith for the purpose of distinguishing it, too, from values and ideas attributable to “Hellenism”; one such writer was the 19th-century poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold. In the 20th-century, the philosopher Leo Strauss developed his own understanding of the gulf between these two ways of looking at the world. As against such thinkers, the classicist Louis Feldman suggests that the sharpening of seemingly irreconcilable opposites—Hebraic obedience vs. Hellenistic intelligence, Hellenistic reason vs. Hebraic revelation, and so forth—has sometimes been pursued at the expense of a more nuanced and truer picture.

The Goldstone Report on Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war, endorsed by the UN General Assembly on November 5, has taken on a life of its own in the court of world public opinion. Increasingly, both its enthusiasts and its detractors see it as a weapon, even more potent than the UN’s Zionism-Racism resolution of November 1975, in a campaign to render illegitimate the very existence of the state of Israel.

So loud has the drumbeat over the Report become, and so widening its repercussions, that an entire website—cited in the first item below—is needed to collect the facts and to keep track of the debate on all sides. Below, two representative arguments, pro and con, are offered by a leading Arab newspaper and a leading American one. They are followed by longer critical analyses by, respectively, a moral philosopher and a legal expert. Finally, excerpts from two books help to place today’s issues in the context of a long-running internal Jewish debate.