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Isaac Rosenfeld and the New York IntellectualsMonday, May 3, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
"We still don't understand what happened to the Jews of Europe, and perhaps we never will." Thus wrote the American intellectual and novelist Isaac Rosenfeld in the February 1948 issue of the New Leader. Arguing that in the wake of the Holocaust the familiar discussion of good and evil had become a useless exercise in nostalgia, he concluded: "Terror beyond evil, and joy beyond good: that is all there is to work with, whether we are to understand what has happened, or begin all over again." This was one of the earliest and still one of the most powerful attempts to...
Monday, May 3, 2010 by Jonathan Beck | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
A survivor of the Holocaust and Israel's War of Independence, Avigdor Arikha, who has died in Paris at eighty-one, turned away from abstraction to become a major figurative artist.Therapeutic Judaism
Friday, April 30, 2010 by Alan Brill | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Pesah Sheni, a holiday of religious second chances that fell this year on April 28, is evolving into a celebration of inclusivity for all.Conspiracy Theorists Flock Together
Friday, April 30, 2010 by Ted Bromund | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Figures on the extreme right and extreme left agree: Israel is the problem.Washington’s “Chief Rabbi”
Friday, April 30, 2010 by Matt Schudel | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Memorializing Gedaliah Anemer, a rabbinic authority and neighborly father figure in the Jewish life of the capital.What Would Herzl Do?
Friday, April 30, 2010 by Gil Troy | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Alighting in modern Israel on his 150th birthday, the founding father reacts with amazement, consternation, and a dream.
Philosophy as a Way of LifeFriday, April 30, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Philosophy literally means "love of wisdom." Yet a glance at contemporary academic philosophy is enough to make one ask, "What's love got to do with it?" How could such dry, tedious, soulless verbal excursions ever have been meaningful to anyone, let alone some of the greatest minds in history? The answer is that in its origins philosophy was not an abstract theoretical enterprise but a way of being in the world--an exercise of reason in furtherance of a broader spiritual and moral regimen. Restoring this lost perspective was the work of the French intellectual historian Pierre Hadot, who died last week at...
Friday, April 30, 2010 by David Horovitz and Khaled Abu Toameh | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Is the PA intent on sidestepping diplomacy, establishing a state with the help of the UN, and continuing the conflict?Is Anti-Semitism a Disease?
Thursday, April 29, 2010 by Warren Boroson | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
And if so, is America immune? An interview with Alvin Rosenfeld on the origins, manifestations, and treatment of a resurgent pathology.
Imagined CommunitiesThursday, April 29, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
"The plain sense of things," Wallace Stevens wrote, "had itself to be imagined." Without imagination, there is no culture, language, or for that matter any recognizably human life. But what happens to the "plain sense of things" in the computer age when, with the emergence of virtual reality and virtual community, imagined life can take over, subsume, or become a substitute for recognizably human life? The question presses itself with special urgency in the case of Judaism and the Jews. A specific people, a specific place, a framework of mitzvot laying emphasis on what we eat, utter, and do: all of these...
