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Earthly Gardens
Wednesday, January 4, 2012 by Adam Kirsch | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks

In defiance of the Holocaust, novelist Giorgio Bassani claims the Jamesian right to draw the circumference of his work where he wants it, where it is most artistically fitting.
Japan’s Inner Israel
Wednesday, January 4, 2012 by Glenn Newman | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks

Both Japan and Israel rose from deprivation to prosperity in, historically speaking, the blink of an eye. But now Israel is punching far above its economic weight, while Japan can't seem to get off the mat. What happened?
A Grief Observed
Wednesday, January 4, 2012 by Eitan Fishbane | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks

"Three and a half months it took me, but today when I woke I knew all of a sudden; all at once I was filled with the desire, with the need, to visit your grave": a young widower's kaddish.
Unity in Jerusalem
Tuesday, January 3, 2012 by Trudy Rubin | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks

"Here is a place . . . where political and religious jealousies can be forgotten," reads the inscription on the neo-Byzantine building. And it has delivered on that promise. What institution is it?
Persuaded
Tuesday, January 3, 2012 by D.G. Myers | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks

On the heels of his roll call of the best Jewish books of 2011, Myers reflects on how the prose of Irving Kristol led to his own political and religious "right turns."      
Breaking the Fourth Wall
Tuesday, January 3, 2012 by Steven Hayward | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks

A young photojournalist exposes how his colleagues have become not merely part of the story of Palestinian unrest on the West Bank, but the instigators of it. (Video)
Indices, Plural
Tuesday, January 3, 2012 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks

The New York Times' recent report on a new index to the Talmud neglected to point out that this work stands in the shadow of a 16th-century index—one that, perhaps, changed the course of Jewish history.    
The Great Assimilator
Tuesday, January 3, 2012 by Christopher Hitchens | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks

Martin Amis vividly remembered something Saul Bellow had once said to him, which is that if you are born in the ghetto, the very conditions compel you to look skyward, and thus to hunger for the universal. (2007)    
Decoding Day School Enrollment
Monday, January 2, 2012 by J.J. Goldberg | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks

Despite two decades and millions of dollars spent pushing the idea, Jewish day schooling just isn't catching on among non-Orthodox American Jews.
The Afghanistan Genizah
Monday, January 2, 2012 by Gil Shefler | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks

The scholarly world is abuzz over a cave filled with ancient scrolls that may be the most significant historical discovery in the Jewish world since that of the Cairo Genizah.  (Hebrew report with video here.)