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Vay’hi: Zealotry and ToleranceWednesday, January 4, 2012 by David Hazony | Jewish Ideas Daily » Weekly Portions
The time of patriarchs was reaching its end. Jacob was dying, and alongside his dictation of burial arrangements, he also gave final words to his twelve sons, words in which he would tell them "what will befall you in the end of days." We usually read them as his final "blessings." But in the case of two sons, Simeon and Levi, they are assuredly curses.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012 by Daniel Johnson | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
The Jews of Vienna did not merely understand the world: they took Marx's point and changed it, too. From Freud's psychoanalysis to Wittgenstein's philosophy, from Mahler's music to Herzl's Zionism, they made a unique contribution to modernity.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012 by Yair Ettinger | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
We hear a lot about the ultra-Orthodox community's fractious encounters with outsiders. But is this growing extremism a reaction to dramatic changes within ultra-Orthodoxy itself?Three Talmudists Confront the Evil Urge
Wednesday, January 4, 2012 by Shai Secunda, Amit Gevaryahu, Eva Kiesele, and Raphael Magarik | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
A symposium on the psychological, historical, and rabbinic development of the yetzer hara picks up where Jewish Ideas Daily left off. 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.

Tuesday, January 3, 2012 by Alex Joffe | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
From the southern end of the plaza in front of Jerusalem's Western Wall, a temporary wooden bridge ascends eastward to the Mughrabi Gate, the only one of the 11 gates into the Temple Mount area that is accessible to non-Muslims.
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.