After One-Hundred-and-Twenty: Reflecting on Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in the Jewish Tradition
I know I’m not alone in wrestling with my own mortality. I was asked these questions many times during my rabbinic career as people aged and as loved ones died – but never did I think they related to me personally. Now I find myself looking for answers to these questions, and I’ve found answers in Hillel Halkin’s After One-Hundred-and-Twenty: Reflecting on Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in the Jewish Tradition.
Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, the Pastor Who Defied the Nazis
German Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemöller is best known for his celebrated confession. These oft-quoted words at Holocaust commemorative observances might lead you to believe that Niemöller was sympathetic to Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. Not true.
Beyond the Shadows: The Holocaust and the Danish Exception
Judy Glickman Lauder’s photographs in Beyond the Shadows: The Holocaust and the Danish Exception are so masterfully crafted they make us feel as if we ourselves are on the train tracks approaching Treblinka, behind the barbed wire fence at Majdanek, at the entrance of Dachau under the sign Arbeit Macht Frei, outside a gas chamber at Auschwitz. Faced with these images, we can’t help but imagine what it must have been like for the millions of innocents who entered these passageways, in most cases never to return.
Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "The American Dream"
Many American Jews shuddered as Donald Trump proclaimed, “The American Dream is dead!” and “America first!” to rally crowds during his 2016 presidential campaign. We remembered how, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, these slogans were an open call for virulent anti-Semitism, pro-Nazi sentiment, white supremacy, xenophobia, and nativism.
The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What Everyone Needs to Know
The title of Professor Dov Waxman’s new book, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What Everyone Needs to Know, hides an important tension that gets explained in the course of reading this book, which addresses a most complex and confusing topic.
American Rabbis: Facts and Fiction
In Ishmael’s House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands
How did Jews and Muslims interact in lands under Muslim rule, from Afghanistan to Morocco?
The Weight of Ink
“Never underestimate the passion of a lonely mind,” Helen Watt, a British expert in Jewish history, tells her research assistant, post-graduate student Aaron Levy
Catch-67: The Left, the Right, and the Legacy of The Six Day War
Micah Goodman has been called “Israel’s philosopher” and “a prophet of the nation’s angst.”
Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi of Amsterdam
Manoel Dias Soeiro was born in Lisbon in 1604 into an outwardly Roman Catholic family that had been forced by the Inquisition to abandon its Jewish faith and practices