First, the bad news: Sexual, physical, and emotional abuse occurs in Orthodox Jewish communities. Next, the worse news: Two recent New York Times stories are just the latest piece of evidence that Orthodox communities are often in denial and worse.
Édith Piaf (by Julia Pirotte).
Mindla Diament was a beautiful woman. We know that from the portrait her older sister Julia Pirotte took of her in Marseille in 1942. In Julia's picture Mindla's face emerges from darkness, classically Semitic, with large eyes, a full mouth, slender neck, and imposing spiritual depth.
In the great crazy quilt of Israeli religious and spiritual life, the cluster of ideas and practices called "New Age" (in Hebrew, 'Idan Hadash) is increasingly visible. Love it or hate it, it's around, in books, festivals, newspapers, the pronouncements of tycoons, and growing networks of popular Kabbalah.
If Ed Miliband, leader of Britain's Labor Party, emerges victorious from the country's next general election, he will become the first Jewish Prime Minister to inhabit Number 10 Downing Street since Benjamin Disraeli renovated the innards of that venerable residence in 1877.
There is a lot of hand-wringing these days about whether the rising costs of Jewish day schools are sustainable. The discussion has been about money: How can we get more? How can we spend less? These questions miss the point.
Elhanan Yakira, professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has all the credentials of a man of the Israeli Left: born and raised in Tel Aviv as a Zionist and socialist , a lifelong secular Jew, an opponent of West Bank settlements, an advocate of government intervention in economic policy. Yet many of his colleagues on the Left denounce him as a right-winger and a traitor.
Aryeh Tepper
Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934) was the poet of Jewish national rebirth and a leading light of cultural Zionism. To be more precise, he was a power station. Composing poems, writing essays, founding journals, raising up the sparks of Israel's past, Bialik became an essential source of energy for Jewish cultural revival.
Ruth R. Wisse
It was bound to happen. Abraham Sutzkever, born July 15, 1913, in Smorgon, Lithuania, one of the great poets of the twentieth century and the last towering figure of modern Yiddish literature, died this Wednesday, January 20, in Tel Aviv, where he had lived since 1947. A descendant of rabbis, Sutzkever applied to the writing of poetry the standards of refinement that his ancestors had practiced in obedience to Jewish religious law. During World War II, when he was herded into the ghetto with the rest of Vilna Jewry, he determinedly continued composing, persuaded that "the angel of poetry" protects the creator of timeless—but only of truly timeless—work.
Probably the most famous and universally beloved Jewish song of the modern era was written to a hasidic melody by Abraham Zvi Idelsohn (1882-1938). A prolific musicologist, composer, and cantor, Idelsohn wrote the song to celebrate the 1917 Balfour Declaration. In 1922, he recorded it with a Berlin men’s choir in a startlingly slow (to today’s ears) tempo. Since then it has been performed, effervescently, by Jews and non-Jews in countless arrangements and settings.
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