Article Archives

New York Jews: Growing in Numbers, Growing Apart

Ever since the first 23 Jewish settlers arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654, New York City has been the economic, cultural, religious and, not least, demographic center of Jewish life in North America.  

Freud in Zion

Three Jewishly-conflicted German speakers changed the course of modern history. By the time the first, Karl Marx, had died in 1883, Sigmund Freud and Theodor Herzl were rising stars in their twenties; later, they came to be neighbors living but a few doors apart on a Vienna street. 

War and Peace: the Jewish Version

Imagine no religion—and, therefore, no war.  It’s easy if you try, and a number of recent writers have done so: the "new atheists," who find religion irrational and believe that its skewed perspective permits, encourages, sometimes even demands war. 

Hollywood Goes to Auschwitz

Hollywood’s first encounter with the Holocaust came decades before Schindler’s List or any such dramatizations. The footage of genocide and its perpetrators, captured by three iconic American directors, shaped not only how we perceive the Holocaust, but also the subsequent development of American cinema—and the directors themselves.

Deportation Dilemmas

Developed countries inevitably attract migrants in search of freedom or economic opportunity; no less inevitably, some native-born citizens react negatively, occasionally with violence, as neighborhoods change and livelihoods become threatened by the influx of cheaper labor.

Disturbing the Universe

Today, in an exclusive preview from the new issue of the Jewish Review of Books, preeminent Kabbalah scholar Daniel Matt steps away from his Zohar translation for the first time in years to review Lawrence Krauss's New Atheist account of the Big Bang and Alan Lightman's quirky novel about creation. Special to Jewish Ideas Daily readers: Click here to receive a free copy of the whole summer issue!

Englishing the Talmud

According to a rabbinic tradition recorded in the Talmud (Shabbat 12b), God’s angels do not understand the Aramaic language in which the Talmud itself is mainly composed. As many a modern reader can testify, they’re hardly alone.

Parsis and Jews, Exile and Return

At the turn of the 16th century, the Portuguese discovered an eastern passage to India that afforded them easy access to well-priced goods and to India’s natural wonders and human curiosities—and they encountered a community, exiled hundreds of years earlier, that many mistook for Jews.

When Jews Became Doctors

The study of medicine has fascinated the Jewish imagination for centuries, from the mysterious remedies of the Talmud to the medieval medical practice of Maimonides and the modern age of my-son-the-doctor​ bragging rights.

The Last Holy Rebel

Some years ago, a friend asked what I thought was the more impressive title: "Rabbi," "Doctor," or (the often unwittingly self-parodying) "Rabbi Dr."  You know, I said, there's a man in Israel who's one of the most impressive talmidei hakhamim I've ever known—and he's not "Rabbi" or "Doctor."