To our readers:
In observance of Shavuot, Jewish Ideas Daily will not publish on May 28.

Cyrus Cylinder postage stamp (Iran).

Cyrus, Ahmadinejad, and the Politics of Purim

 

At this week's pre-Purim meeting in Washington between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu to discuss Iran's nuclear threat to Israel, Netanyahu gave Obama a present: the book (or m'gilah, scroll) of Esther, which tells how the Jewish heroine foiled Haman's plot to kill the Jews of ancient Persia.

The Cyrus Cylinder  British Museum.  An illustrated introduction to a prize object in the British Museum; as the English translation shows, the king addresses himself to his own accomplishments, not the rights of his subjects.  SAVE

2600 Years of History in One Object  Neil MacGregor,  TED.  The director of the British Museum is among those touting the Cyrus Cylinder's inscription as one of the "great declarations of a human aspiration." (Video)  SAVE

Ghosts of Purim Past  Jeffrey Goldberg,  New York Times.  A report on a 2003 visit to Iran and on close encounters with Islamic anti-Semitism.  SAVE

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Material World

 

When is a text not a text? When it is an object. When a Torah scroll is held up in the air so that congregants can view its columns of words, it is not being read. The words that the congregation chants are indeed found in the scroll, but in two different places.

The Jewish Book  Cambridge University Press.  Articles from the AJS Review, presented by a "working group" on the Jewish book.  SAVE

Blog for the Study of the Jewish Book  Adam Shear.  Events, announcements, and links for the study of Jewish books.  SAVE

2011 AJS Conference  Association for Jewish Studies.  At the most recent conference of the Association of Jewish Studies, a session discussed "The Materiality of Texts and Jewish Experience: Past and Present."  SAVE

People of the Byte  Alex Joffe,  Jewish Ideas Daily.  Jews have long been the People of the Book. But as computers replace books and possibly libraries, museums, and universities, what will happen to their understanding of their history?  SAVE

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Jewish Ethics, from Ancient Bible to Modern Bus

 

The next time someone tells you that ethical behavior doesn't need a foundation in religious teaching, step onto an Israeli bus (it doesn't have to be the gender-segregated variety) or open a mass-circulation Israeli newspaper and see how religion puts Jewish ethics on steroids.

The Pale God  Aryeh Tepper,  Jewish Ideas Daily.  Spinoza begins the process of turning God from an interventionist to a grandfatherly figure sitting in a corner.  SAVE

Hope in a Democratic Age  Alan Mittleman,  Oxford University Press.  Mittleman explains that hope should be viewed as not merely a sentiment but an ethical choice and a virtue that is critical to modern democracies.  SAVE

The Business of Ethics  Havruta.  A Hartman Institute symposium on the responsibilities of the Jewish community toward the needy (PDF; 2010); also briefly summarized here.  SAVE

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From New Year to Arbor Day

 

The holiday of Tu Bishvat ("the fifteenth of Shvat") falls this year on Wednesday, February 8. What are its origins, and when and why did it become incorporated into the calendar as the Jewish "Arbor Day"?

When Have "Most of the Rains Passed"?  Yair Goldreich,  Bar-Ilan University.  Analyzing the climatic factors that help determine the date of Tu Bishvat.  SAVE

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The Dangerous Mr. Nelson

 

Eric Nelson is a danger to academia. You would not think so from his background. He is the Frederick S. Danziger Associate Professor of Government at Harvard University. He has had a proper education, at Harvard and Trinity College, Cambridge.

Jerusalem and Athens  Leo Strauss,  Jewish Ideas Daily.  Strauss's seminal essay on the Greeks, the Hebrew Bible, and the profound differences between the two.  SAVE

Created Equal  Joshua Berman,  Oxford University Press.  While ancient Greece is often considered the cradle of political thought, "the patrimony of modern political thought rests no less squarely in the texts of the Bible."  SAVE

The Bible and the Good Life  Aryeh Tepper,  Jewish Ideas Daily.  Arguing with God is one thing. Where is the evidence that the Bible is a philosophical text?  SAVE

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Insight & Analysis

Amid the Alien Corn  Jewish Ideas Daily.  In one stunning declaration, the young Ruth shattered what had previously been an impermeable barrier of Israelite law, reshaping the law and Jewish history at once.  SAVE

Witnesses to the Bible?  Matti Friedman.  Times of Israel.  Two rare 3,000-year-old models of ancient shrines are among the artifacts claimed by an Israeli archeologist as evidence for the historical veracity of the Bible.  SAVE

The Reality of Race  Jon Entine.  Forward.  Historical analysis now depends not only on pottery shards, flaking manuscripts, and faded coins, but on something far less ambiguous: DNA. And the study of Jewish DNA yields some surprising findings.  SAVE

Caves of Refuge  Eli Ashkenazi.  Haaretz.  A fifth mikveh has been found in the caves on the Galilee's Cliffs of Arbel, indicating that the people who lived there under Roman rule were most likely kohanim, Jews of the priestly class.  SAVE

The Frum Jesus  Greg Carey.  Huffington Post.  Jesus seems to have habitually transgressed the Torah, which the New Testament claims he abolished outright. So why do historians conclude that Jesus lived as a Torah-observant Jew?.  SAVE

What a Friend We Have in Jesus  Paula Fredriksen.  Jewish Review of Books.  Until very recently, scholarly work on the Jewishness of Christianity has been a largely Christian project, but over the past fifty years, in ever-larger numbers, Jewish scholars have joined in.  SAVE

Genetic Threads  Josh Fischman.  Chronicle of Higher Education.  The story of Jewish origins, once the province of historians and scholars of religion, is now being told by DNA—and it decisively refutes the counter-narratives promulgated by Shlomo Sand.  SAVE

Q & A

But for the Grace of Babylon: A Conversation with Irving Finkel

 

On the way to work from his home in south London, Dr. Irving Finkel often finds himself sitting on a bus reading the Hebrew Bible while surrounded by black church ladies studying their Bibles. "If they only knew what I was thinking," he muses.

Unlike his fellow passengers, what the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Inscriptions at the British Museum is thinking is that the Bible is not the literal word of God, but that it was crystallized during the sixth-century B.C.E. Babylonian exile by a displaced people from Judea who had lost their country, whose deity was invisible, abstract, and unforgiving, and whose monotheism had gone wobbly. Their decision to create "scripture," something that had never before been attempted, saved the refugees' civilization and enshrined their religious identity. The result was Judaism.

Continue Reading "But for the Grace of Babylon"  Elliot Jager,  Jewish Ideas Daily.  A British Museum scholar offers a Darwinian explanation for Judaism's survival.  SAVE

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The Weekly Portion

Terumah

 

Exodus 25:1 – 27:19

The Sanctity of the Small  David Hazony,  Jewish Ideas Daily.  The problem with grandeur is that it contains a bit of a lie.  SAVE

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