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Baseball, Football, and Abraham Joshua HeschelMonday, April 19, 2010 by Jonah Goldwater | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
An inquiry, against the background of the Sabbath, into George Carlin's comic routine on the divide between the two great American games.
Remembering the Fallen, and Why They FellMonday, April 19, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
The ten days from last week's Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah) through today's Memorial Day (Yom Hazikaron) to tomorrow's Independence Day (Yom Ha'atzma'ut) constitute, for Israelis and many Jews worldwide, a passage in which the theme of death and loss plays an inevitably central role. The evolution of that theme over the years has come to be reflected in poetic texts and liturgies whose meaning has itself evolved in Israeli and Jewish consciousness. Perhaps the most famous of these texts is Magash Hakesef ("The Silver Platter") by the poet Natan Alterman, the centennial of whose birth is being marked this year....
Monday, April 19, 2010 by James Risen and Yossi Klein Halevi | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
A six-part exchange on what Americans and Israelis are trying to say to each other.Unwelcome Mat
Monday, April 19, 2010 by Allan Nadler | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
How the ultra-Orthodox gained a stranglehold on standards of conversion to Judaism, and how it can and should be undone.Mourning Lech Kaczynski
Friday, April 16, 2010 by Konstanty Gebert | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Poland's Jewish remnant responded to his outspoken sympathy not only with Israel but with them and their history—and to his brand of Polish pride.Thanking Heaven for the Jewish State
Friday, April 16, 2010 by Michael Pitkowsky | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Over the decades, a variety of liturgical responses have been composed in celebration of Israel's Independence Day (includes Hebrew content).
Sir Moses MontefioreFriday, April 16, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
The name alone conjures up story-book images of a horse-drawn carriage from which a pious Victorian benefactor alights to bribe a local official, endow an orphanage, or dedicate a windmill. Abigail Green's brilliant new biography—elegantly conceived, exhaustively researched, crisply written—presents a far more complicated and fascinating picture. Montefiore was born in 1784 to a family embedded in the cosmopolitan network of merchant Jews linking London, Livorno, Amsterdam, and the New World: a Sephardi diaspora well-placed for the opportunities presented by the liberalizations of 19th-century Europe. Montefiore made deft use of the new dispensation, at first to make his fortune through his...
Friday, April 16, 2010 by Walter Mayr | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
A wanted Nazi war criminal responsible for the mass executions of Estonian Jews lived and worked in Germany for a half-century before dying in a retirement home two weeks ago.Miles to Go Before He Slept
Friday, April 16, 2010 by Yuval Elbashan | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
In an amazing chain of events, the bones of a once-famous rabbi and Zionist have been removed from a cardboard box in Paris and re-interred in Israel 125 years after his death.Meet the Reform Rabbi
Thursday, April 15, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
An Orthodox blogger gives a platform to a Reform friend to introduce himself and his beliefs. (Part 2, includes link to Part 1.)