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Easter, Passover, and the West Side Story that Wasn’tWednesday, April 27, 2011 by Elliott Horowitz | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Late in 1948, in the early stages of his collaboration with Jerome Robbins on the musical that would become West Side Story, Leonard Bernstein wrote in his diary: "Jerry R. called today with a noble idea: a modern version of Romeo and Juliet set in slums at the coincidence of Easter-Passover celebrations. Feelings run high between Jews and Catholics. . . . "
Wednesday, April 27, 2011 by Margot Lurie | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Eliaz Cohen's poems are far from an example, let alone a vindication, of right-wing art.
How the Likud Came to BeFriday, April 22, 2011 by Elliot Jager | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Benjamin Netanyahu no doubt took comfort from a recent survey showing that 76 percent of Likud members opposed annexing all of Judea and Samaria. Yet he would also have known that 10,000 party recruits had been newly signed up by uncompromising settler leaders. How to keep the Likud ("Union") together and in the center of Israel's political mainstream?
Friday, April 22, 2011 by The Editors | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Around the world this weekend, Christians are preparing to celebrate Easter, the holiday marking the death and resurrection of Jesus and the culmination of the period of penitence that began with Ash Wednesday. To this day there is no denying that, for many Jews, Easter recalls dreadful memories.From Our Archives: Whatever Happened to Moses Mendelssohn?
Friday, April 22, 2011 by Allan Nadler | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
The great German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1781) was and remains a perplexing, rather sad, enigma. One of Jewish history's most original philosophers, he was also a valiant pioneer of European Jewry's struggle for acceptance into the larger society. Yet within a generation after his death he was already an obscure figure, and is now almost entirely forgotten.From Our Archives: Kabbalah and its Discontents
Friday, April 22, 2011 by Aryeh Tepper | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Aside from a small circle of students and admirers, Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag was an unknown figure at his death in 1954. Today, religious schools and New Age "educational centers" around the world are actively spreading his ideas, and his writings are being analyzed by professors and graduate students. After spending an hour in the rabbi's stone mausoleum, the pop-diva Madonna emerged with tears in her eyes.
Not Marc ChagallThursday, April 21, 2011 by Aryeh Tepper | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
In the annals of modernist art, three European Jewish names stand out: Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine, and Amedeo Modigliani. A fourth should be added. This is Emmanuel Mané Katz. Born in 1894 to a traditional Jewish family in the Ukraine, he moved to Paris at the age of nineteen to pursue a career as a painter, and there joined the three more fabled artists named above. Together, they have been loosely called "the School of Paris."
Thursday, April 21, 2011 by Efraim Karsh | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
"Two states, living side by side in peace and security." This, in the words of President Barack Obama, is the solution to the century-long conflict between Jews and Palestinian Arabs in the Middle East. Washington is fully and determinedly on board. So are the Europeans. Successive governments of the state of Israel have shown their support for the idea. So far, there is—just as there has always been—only one holdout.From Our Archives: In Memoriam Abraham Sutzkever
Thursday, April 21, 2011 by Ruth R. Wisse | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
It was bound to happen. Abraham Sutzkever, born July 15, 1913, in Smorgon, Lithuania, one of the great poets of the twentieth century and the last towering figure of modern Yiddish literature, died January 20, 2010, in Tel Aviv, where he had lived since 1947. During World War II, when Sutzkever was herded into the ghetto with the rest of Vilna Jewry, he determinedly continued composing, persuaded that "the angel of poetry" protects the creator of timeless—but only of truly timeless—work.From Our Archives: The Soul and the Machine
Thursday, April 21, 2011 by Yehudah Mirsky | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
The astounding growth of the Internet, computer technology, and artificial intelligence is a commonplace of our time; so is the challenge each poses to familiar ways of commerce and culture, and even to our basic understandings of humanity. Some of the farthest reaches of these developments are expressed in the "singularity" envisioned by the futurologist Raymond Kurzweil.