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Why Grandmas Love Mah JonggTuesday, May 11, 2010 by Avi Kaplan | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
The Chinese-derived game that became a Jewish-American tradition. (With audio slide show.)Islam’s Nowhere Men
Monday, May 10, 2010 by Fouad Ajami | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Living on the seam between the Old Country and the New World, multitudes like Faisal Shahzad make up a deadly breed of combatants in a new kind of war.The Némirovsky Paradox
Monday, May 10, 2010 by Francine Prose | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
A new biography unconvincingly defends the Russian-Jewish-French novelist who died in Auschwitz in 1942 and whose work, rediscovered in 2004 to worldwide adulation, was then revealed to harbor a pronounced anti-Semitic streak.Soothing the Savage Breast?
Monday, May 10, 2010 by Jeremy Eichler | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
The gambist Jordi Savall's ambitious "Jerusalem" project offers mesmerizing sounds but fails to demonstrate music's alleged power to unite and conciliate.Tar Heels
Monday, May 10, 2010 by Ben Steelman | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
A new book narrates the Jewish history of North Carolina, from Roanoke Island to Harry Golden and beyond.What “Coexistence”?
Monday, May 10, 2010 by Bataween | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
A glowing report in Haaretz misrepresents the reality of Moroccan Jewish life.
Europa EuropaMonday, May 10, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
The 65th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe will be marked this week with speeches, parades, and, one imagines, more than a little concern. The free-fall of the Greek economy has exposed enormous fault lines in the economic institutions of the European Union and the moral community on which it rests. Similarly concentrating the European mind are the recent electoral success of the far-right Jobbik party in Hungary, Russia's swift victory over Georgia and NATO in August 2008, and the challenge presented by the swelling numbers of Muslims and by militant Islam to the new Europe's...
Friday, May 7, 2010 by Philologos | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Tracing a word that seems to mean the same thing in Hebrew, English, and Latin.
LeviticusFriday, May 7, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Tomorrow, synagogue-goers will hear the final yearly readings from the biblical Book of Leviticus (in Hebrew, Vayikra). As every year, they will no doubt reflect on what is in some ways the most challenging and mind-bending volume of the Torah. The books flanking Leviticus on either side easily comport with what we usually think of as "religious literature." The two before it, Genesis and Exodus, tell stories of creation, family and nation-building, enslavement, exodus, and revelation. Of the two after it, Numbers offers morality tales of the wilderness and Deuteronomy gives us poetry, prophecy, and detailed ethical-legal teachings. By contrast, Leviticus...
Friday, May 7, 2010 by Ben Hartman | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
At a Tikvah-sponsored summer program in Israel, a select group of students, educators, and intellectuals will revisit the founding ideas behind a state at once Jewish and democratic.