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Right of ReturnWednesday, August 11, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Although certified as Jewish by two rabbinical courts, a backsliding convert to Christianity has been denied Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return—but, in a novel and suggestive ruling, invited to try again.Crescent Rising
Wednesday, August 11, 2010 by Patricia Crone | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
A new book presents early Islam as tolerant, open, and ecumenical—an appealing picture, but false to the historical record.Shoftim: Judgment Call
Wednesday, August 11, 2010 by David Hazony | Jewish Ideas Daily » Weekly Portions
"Judges and officers shall you make for yourself in all your gates," we are told at the opening of this week's reading, "and they shall judge the people with righteous judgment." The declaration seems obvious at first blush. Who wouldn't want righteous judges? Yet the Bible—more so, perhaps, than any other text of the ancient world—is singularly attentive to this issue of judges, making it into one of the central demands of the Torah.What Israel-Palestinian Peace Won’t Fix
Tuesday, August 10, 2010 by James Kirchick | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
A useful fiction to Western governments, even more useful as a propaganda tool of Arab and Muslim regimes, the term "linkage" masks an empty and dangerous illusion.Grand Delusion
Tuesday, August 10, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
When it came to nationalism, the late historian and intellectual Tony Judt kept one set of books for Europe and the world and another, invidious one, for the Jewish state.Hasidism Spoken Here
Tuesday, August 10, 2010 by Deborah Solomon | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Yehuda Krinsky, the Chabad leader named by Newsweek as America's most influential rabbi, answers questions about the Rebbe, Bob Dylan, Mayor Bloomberg, e-mail, and more.Cantors, Klezmorim, and Crooners
Tuesday, August 10, 2010 by Nat Hentoff | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
A wide-ranging compilation of Jewish soul music from the first half of the 20th century has been skillfully re-mastered and released in a 3-CD set. (With audio clips.)He Stayed Behind
Tuesday, August 10, 2010 by Ofer Aderet | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Born in Nuremberg, Germany in 1923, escaping to Palestine in 1939, returning after the war to find his parents still alive, Arno Hamburger remained by their side until their deaths; at eighty-seven, he heads the city's Jewish community.
Rootless Cosmopolitan(s)Tuesday, August 10, 2010 by Sam Munson | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
The search for the Next Big Thing is as endemic in the American literary world as in politics and the clothing industry. When it comes to writers, the itch tends to express itself through the excited serial discovery of identifiably new or neglected "voices," preferably young and often of the ethnic or sexual variety: African-American, or second-wave feminist, or, recently, immigrant Russian-Jewish. Members of this last category are taken to include the short-story writer Lara Vapnyar, the music critic Alex Halberstadt, the literary anthologist Boris Fishman, and Keith Gessen, a founder of the cultural journal n+1 and sometime novelist. Whether...
Monday, August 9, 2010 by Francine Prose | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Two Dutch novels of the Holocaust, published in 1947 and 1962 and only now available in English, are revelations: subtle and penetrating studies of the human heart, and literary masterworks.

