Search Results
You can also browse by author, browse by source, or view the archives.
Emancipation & Its DiscontentsMonday, December 14, 2009 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
“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...
Monday, December 14, 2009 by Andrew Roberts | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
“Britain has never been much more than a fair-weather friend to Jewish national aspirations.”What Judith Did
Monday, December 14, 2009 by Erica Brown | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
The legend of a brave and pious woman, and the lessons of Hanukkah.What Does the European Union Want?
Friday, December 11, 2009 by Dore Gold | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
What it wants is to divide the city of Jerusalem.“Torah Law” in Israel’s Courts: Fighting Words
Friday, December 11, 2009 by David Hazony | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Israelis both secular and religious are right to oppose Minister Neeman’s revolutionary idea.“Torah Law” in Israel’s Courts: Bring it On
Friday, December 11, 2009 by Anshel Pfeffer | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
One of the world’s oldest and most adaptive legal codes has much to contribute to modern legal understanding—and besides, it might find itself transformed in the process.The Stones Speak
Friday, December 11, 2009 by Brian Blondy | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
A newly deciphered inscription verifies the events precipitating the Maccabean Revolt and the story of Hanukkah.Judaism and Academic Jewish Studies: Friends or Foes?
Friday, December 11, 2009 by The Staff | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
A student interview with David Berger, professor and dean of graduate Jewish studies at Yeshiva University.
The New SyncretismFriday, December 11, 2009 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
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...
Thursday, December 10, 2009 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
A blogger considers the competition, open to all Israelis, to come up with authentic Hebrew names for Uranus and Neptune.
