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Portrait of the ArtistMonday, February 15, 2010 by Ellie Armon Azoulay | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Pinhas Cohen Gan on the meaning of life, including his own: "reduction, precision, making do with little, believing in God—and creating."Mourning Bernard Lander
Friday, February 12, 2010 by Uriel Heilman | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Inspired in part by the model of small Catholic colleges, an indefatigable American educator created an alternative undergraduate experience for countless tradition-minded Jews.Battles of Paris
Friday, February 12, 2010 by Léa Khayata | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
In the 19th arrondissement, anti-Semitism waxes and wanes, but remains a fact of life.
Eastern EuropeThe 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...
Friday, February 12, 2010 by Daniel Doron | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
In Haiti, Israel revealed not a different face but its true face.Announcing a New Jewish Journal
Friday, February 12, 2010 by Jordan Michael Smith | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
The premiere issue of the Jewish Review of Books, a quarterly—and a sister publication of Jewish Ideas Daily—will be out next week.Bob Dylan’s Black History
Friday, February 12, 2010 by Dayo Olopade | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Paying tribute to "a skinny Jewish man from Minnesota" and his role in the civil-rights movement of the 1960's.Lest They Come Tumbling Down
Friday, February 12, 2010 by Nir Hasson | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
The restoration of Jerusalem's Old City walls, stone by stone.Facing Israel’s Future
Friday, February 12, 2010 by Aluf Benn | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
In an impassioned and startling speech, Benjamin Netanyahu laid stress on the need to recover Israel's cultural patrimony.
FakesThursday, February 11, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
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...