Article Archives

Abba Kovner

But the writer, even in his four walls, is a public. Rupture and renewal, victimization and resistance, annihilation and rebirth:  few writers voiced the hard antinomies of Jewish life and death in the 20th century as did Abba Kovner (1918-1987).  The first major biography of him, by the Israeli historian Dina Porat, recently appeared in English and has won the National Jewish Book Award. Encountering Kovner in its pages makes for bracing reading.  

Jews and Khazars – Again, or Never

The mass conversion to Judaism of the Khazars, a Turkic people from the North Caucaus, in the mid-8th century has fired imaginations for centuries.  Medieval travelers told tantalizing stories of the Jewish kingdom beyond the mountains. In the 12th century, the great Spanish-Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi framed his philosophical masterpiece, The Kuzari, around this story. A very different use of the same story was made by racial theorists in the 19th century, by Arthur Koestler in the 20th century, and by the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand in the 21st. Asserting that Ashkenazi Jewry as a whole descended not from ancient Israel...

Shalom Japan

Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is in Tokyo this week for meetings with Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada. Lieberman is seeking more robust Japanese pressure on Iran to halt its quest for nuclear weapons. His arrival follows a visit only last month by deputy premier Dan Meridor, who is responsible for intelligence matters. Lieberman's other main goal will be strengthening the economic ties between Israel and Japan, which have blossomed since the 1993 Oslo Accords and the weakening of the Arab boycott.  At $3.4 billion worth of business annually, Japan is second only to China as...

Into the Muck; or, Trials of the Diaspora

A London-based lawyer with the firm of Mishcon de Reya, Anthony Julius has the unusual distinction of being a solicitor-advocate—that is, a solicitor who can also appear in court.  He was on the defense team in the suit filed against the historian Deborah Lipstadt by the Holocaut denier David Irving; he has participated in litigating many cases bearing on the interests of Israel; and he represented Princess Diana in the last years of her life. A first-rate scholar, he is also the author of T. S. Eliot: Anti-Semitism and Literary Form (1995), Idolizing Pictures: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Jewish Art (2001),...

Europa Europa

The 65th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe will be marked this week with speeches, parades, and, one imagines, more than a little concern. The free-fall of the Greek economy has exposed enormous fault lines in the economic institutions of the European Union and the moral community on which it rests. Similarly concentrating the European mind are the recent electoral success of the far-right Jobbik party in Hungary, Russia's swift victory over Georgia and NATO in August 2008, and the challenge presented by the swelling numbers of Muslims and by militant Islam to the new Europe's...

Leviticus

Tomorrow, synagogue-goers will hear the final yearly readings from the biblical Book of Leviticus (in Hebrew, Vayikra).  As every year, they will no doubt reflect on what is in some ways the most challenging and mind-bending volume of the Torah. The books flanking Leviticus on either side easily comport with what we usually think of as "religious literature."  The two before it, Genesis and Exodus, tell stories of creation, family and nation-building, enslavement, exodus, and revelation. Of the two after it, Numbers offers morality tales of the wilderness and Deuteronomy gives us poetry, prophecy, and detailed ethical-legal teachings. By contrast, Leviticus...

Tradition!

This week, the Schechter Institute, the chief educational institution of the Conservative movement in Israel, celebrated its 25th anniversary with the opening of two new buildings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.  Following decades of effort, the occasion marks a genuine milestone for the Masorti movement (to use its Hebrew name), a movement still struggling to establish a presence in Israel in the teeth of institutional opposition and public indifference.  Unlike Orthodoxy and Reform, already established as ideological movements in 19th-century Europe, Conservative Judaism, though tracing some of its roots to the 1850s, took shape in early-20th-century America, to become, in the...

Ubiquitous Dissent

The chairman of Peace Now in France, David Chelma, has been instrumental in a new Jewish effort to dissent from Israeli policies. The initiative is dubbed JCall, a term explicitly intended to evoke the Washington-based organization J Street. Over the past weekend, the group issued a web-based petition, entitled "European Jewish Call for Reason," denouncing Israeli settlements as "morally and politically wrong" and seeking to promote a movement in behalf of "the voice of reason." The 3,000-plus signers include such pro-Israel luminaries as the philosophers Bernard Henri-Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut. Israel's former ambassador to France, Elie Barnavi, is also a backer. The campaigners...

The Organized Community

There are hundreds of Jewish organizations in the United States. Fifty-two national groups have qualified for membership in the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. But only a handful, whether secular, religious, or "fraternal," can be said to wield extensive influence either inside the Jewish community or beyond it. One of these is the American Jewish Committee (AJC), a quintessential establishment agency whose annual meeting, held last week in Washington, drew notables from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Israel's Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Founded in New York by affluent, acculturated "uptown" German Jews in 1906, the AJC sought initially to...

Isaac Rosenfeld and the New York Intellectuals

"We still don't understand what happened to the Jews of Europe, and perhaps we never will." Thus wrote the American intellectual and novelist Isaac Rosenfeld in the February 1948 issue of the New Leader. Arguing that in the wake of the Holocaust the familiar discussion of good and evil had become a useless exercise in nostalgia, he concluded: "Terror beyond evil, and joy beyond good: that is all there is to work with, whether we are to understand what has happened, or begin all over again." This was one of the earliest and still one of the most powerful attempts to...