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Holy Societies Holy Societies
Friday, February 19, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

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"...
New Communities New Communities
Tuesday, February 16, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

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...
A Dead Issue? A Dead Issue?
Monday, February 15, 2010 by Elli Fischer | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

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...
Eastern Europe Eastern Europe
Friday, February 12, 2010 by | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

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...
Fakes Fakes
Thursday, 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...
The Heart or the Head? The Heart or the Head?
Wednesday, February 10, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

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...
Master of the Book Master of the Book
Tuesday, February 9, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

"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...
China China
Monday, February 8, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

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...
Holocaust Days Holocaust Days
Thursday, January 28, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

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...
Mediterranean Maimonides Mediterranean Maimonides
Tuesday, January 26, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

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...
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Editors' Picks
Life with Hitler Dorothy Gallagher, New York Times. Probably Eva Braun wished for marriage, but Hitler had another bride: "I am married to the German people and their fate!" A secret girlfriend was another matter.
Sea Change Rami G. Khouri, Daily Star (Beirut). The real story in the Arab world is about the revival of sovereignty, seen in the uncharacteristically decisive Arab League suspension of Syria.
The Lord Provides the Punctuation Adam Nicolson, National Geographic. The first editions of the King James Bible were littered with mistakes. One left out a crucial word in Exodus 20:14, to read "thou shalt commit adultery"—an error for which the printers were heavily fined.
Truth from an Unlikely Source Conrad Black, National Post. The new country of South Sudan has taken its place squarely with the Jewish state and attacked the Arab-led conspiracy against Israel in international organizations.
In Concert Stuart Low, Democrat and Chronicle. How to characterize the work of composers like Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and Mahler, in which Jewish folk tunes and Bible stories are blended with Christian themes?
To Be a Montefiore Mitchell Silver, H-Net. Alan Montefiore has deployed all of the heavy machinery of analytic philosophy to better understand his illustrious family's view that he ought to be a good Jewish boy.
When Einstein Met Tagore Gary Shapiro, Forward. It was staged to be a media sensation when "the thinker with the head of a poet" met "the poet with the head of a thinker." But on philosophical matters, the two titans stood poles apart.
The Judeo-Christian Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Jonathan Sacks, Washington Post. In this perilous economic climate, we should remember the lesson of the world's first economist, the biblical Joseph: Years of plenty tend to be followed by years of hardship.
Tropical Storm Josh Lambert, Tablet. Decades before his obscenity trials would prove him right, Henry Miller wrote in his ambivalently anti-Semitic Tropic of Cancer that "the first people to turn to when you're down and out are the Jews." (Includes obscene language.)
In the Red Army Paul Berger, Forward. Half a million Jews fought for the Soviet Union during its bloody encounter with Nazi Germany; many felt they had "an extra score to settle with Hitler" after finding out about the Holocaust.