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Arts & Culture


Freedom Tales Freedom Tales
Wednesday, April 13, 2011 by Yehudah Mirsky | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

An enslaved people, brutalized, voiceless except for groans and cries, comes into possession of a voice of their own: no wonder the tale itself sometimes seems to embody the whole meaning of the Exodus.
Clash of Civilizations Clash of Civilizations
Friday, April 8, 2011 by Alex Joffe | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

The death toll in Afghanistan has passed the two-dozen mark in the riots "inspired" by Pastor Terry Jones's burning of a Quran in Florida. The grisly political theater has served its purpose.
“We Love Death” “We Love Death”
Wednesday, April 6, 2011 by Aryeh Tepper | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

In 2007, two years before he killed thirteen people and wounded twenty-nine at Fort Hood, Texas, Nidal Malik Hasan prepared a slide show for his fellow Army doctors on the subject of Islam. One of his last points read: "We love death more than you love life!"
Gandhi and the Jews Gandhi and the Jews
Tuesday, April 5, 2011 by Elliot Jager | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

A new book about Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) has set off stormy protests in India for implying that the country's founding father was bisexual. That's only the beginning of it.
Sifting the Cairo Genizah Sifting the Cairo Genizah
Friday, April 1, 2011 by Lawrence Grossman | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

Everyone knows about the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered over 60 years ago, and about the new light they shed on the sectarian Judaism of late antiquity, the beginnings of rabbinic Judaism, and possibly the prehistory of Christianity. Fifty years before that, the Cairo Genizah similarly revolutionized the picture of the Jewish Middle Ages.
Jewish Studies in Decline? Jewish Studies in Decline?
Monday, March 28, 2011 by Alex Joffe | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

Reports prepared recently for Israel's Council of Higher Education have brought despairing news about the condition of the humanities in the country's universities. Especially dispiriting is the report on Jewish studies, once the crowning glory of Israel's flagship Hebrew University—and, in the report's inadvertently nostalgic words, "an investment in the nurturing of the deep spiritual and cultural structures of Israeli public and private life." That investment has been producing ever smaller returns.
The Brothers al-Kuwaiti The Brothers al-Kuwaiti
Friday, March 25, 2011 by Aryeh Tepper | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

Remember "Baghdad Bob," Saddam Hussein's information minister? During the Iraq war, as the cameras showed U.S. tanks rolling through Baghdad, he took to the airwaves to assure his fellow Iraqis that not a single enemy tank had penetrated the city's defenses. As it happens, "Bob," whose real name was Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, was a long-time expert in manufacturing absurd lies for domestic consumption.
Shakespeare, Much Improved? Shakespeare, Much Improved?
Tuesday, March 22, 2011 by Nahma Sandrow | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

One of the few things people think they know about Yiddish theater in America is that once upon a time there was a production, probably of King Lear, advertised as "translated and much improved." Joel Berkowitz's history, Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage (2002), quotes the line but never gives an attribution, which suggests that nobody ever actually said it. But someone might have.
Halakhah for Americans Halakhah for Americans
Friday, March 18, 2011 by Elli Fischer | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

Asked in a 1975 New York Times interview how he had acquired his standing as America's most trusted authority in Jewish religious law (halakhah), Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (1895-1986) replied: ''If people see that one answer is good and another answer is good, gradually you will be accepted."
Toward a Pluralistic Middle East? Toward a Pluralistic Middle East?
Thursday, March 17, 2011 by Aryeh Tepper | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

As the Middle East lurches through the present confusion of civil war, revolution, and mass protest, decent people everywhere wonder about the chances of a more pluralistic and democratic order emerging. One way of measuring progress in that direction will be to track the treatment of minorities like the Berbers and the Jews.
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Editors' Picks
Megalopolis Avital Lahav, Ynet. Is the solution to Israel's housing crisis the creation of a mega-city encompassing much of central Israel?
Israel's Future Air Force Amir Mizroch, Wired. Nano drones that an infantryman can pull out of his pocket, robots that can extract wounded soldiers from the battlefield, algorithms that resolve pilots' ethical dilemmas . . .
Policy Repercussions David Makovsky, Washington Institute. How will Israel's new national unity government pursue policy vis-à-vis domestic issues, Iran, the Palestinians, and U.S.-Israel relations?
American Hebrew Poetry? Jerome Chanes, Forward. One of the best-kept secrets of Jewish American history is the creation of an indigenous Hebrew poetry in the first half of the 20th century.
The Real Opportunity at Hand Dov Lipman, Jerusalem Post. A stable coalition without the ultra-Orthodox parties means that now there is a real chance for change in Israel's policies toward Haredim.
Anti-Fascist Warrior-Hairdresser Tiffany Gabbay, Blaze. From a Sephardic orphanage to the Haganah to the hair salon, Vidal Sassoon, who died yesterday at age 84, lived a life worth celebrating. (Read an interview with Sassoon here.)
Murder is My Business Elizabeth Greenwood, Guernica. Weegee lived opposite NYPD headquarters, and slept most of the day, rising at night to pack flashbulbs into the trunk of his '38 Chevy and prowl the streets looking for bloodstained sidewalks to photograph.
The First Book Maurice Sendak Ever Illustrated Peter D. Sieruta, Collecting Children's Books. The co-author of Atomics for the Millions asked one of his high school students if he would illustrate the volume. The student agreed to do the artwork in exchange for $100 and a passing grade.
Nobel Nuggets Jay Nordlinger, National Review. There was no Nobel Peace Prize for 1939, because Germany invaded Poland on September 1. (Forty-seven years later, Henry Kissinger would write to Elie Wiesel: "I was not proud of my Nobel, but I am of yours.")
Search on a Centennial Ben Sales, JTA. One hundred years ago, Yosef Haim Brenner sold a pair of suspenders to fund the publication of S.Y. Agnon's first book—copies of which are now actively sought after.