Education
Anti-Semitism 101Friday, May 6, 2011 by Alex Joffe | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
One of the many dismaying things about anti-Semitism is its lack of originality. The rhetoric and setting change, but the substance persists. Anti-Semitism on American campuses is no exception; but the mere fact that it exists, and that it is virulent, is sufficient to merit the alarm it has caused.
Messianic TemptationsThursday, April 7, 2011 by Yehudah Mirsky | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
The downfall of Moshe Katsav, the former president of Israel recently convicted and sentenced on a rape charge, is a many-sided episode—involving his crimes, the media circus around the judicial proceedings against him, and the private and public meanings of his disgrace.
“The Sickening Question”: God, Cancer, and UsMonday, April 4, 2011 by Eve Levavi Feinstein | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Many scholars of the Bible and ancient Judaism prefer to focus exclusively on ancient texts and the world that produced them, refraining from engaging with the implications of their work for contemporary religious life. James L. Kugel has never been one of those scholars.
Jewish Studies in Decline?Monday, March 28, 2011 by Alex Joffe | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Reports prepared recently for Israel's Council of Higher Education have brought despairing news about the condition of the humanities in the country's universities. Especially dispiriting is the report on Jewish studies, once the crowning glory of Israel's flagship Hebrew University—and, in the report's inadvertently nostalgic words, "an investment in the nurturing of the deep spiritual and cultural structures of Israeli public and private life." That investment has been producing ever smaller returns.
Identity = ?Thursday, March 10, 2011 by Yehudah Mirsky | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
In discussions of that elusive entity known as "Jewishness," few terms have become so ubiquitous, and as a consequence so elusive, as "Jewish identity." The phrase regularly serves as the name of a communal dream: the wished-for end product that vast apparatuses of education, institution-building, and programming aim to instill and perpetuate. But what is it?
The Virtuoso of JudaismThursday, March 3, 2011 by Yehudah Mirsky | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Religious virtuosity comes in many forms. One of them is the ability to reconcile seeming irreconcilables, like faith and freedom, piety and intellect, revelation and science. The dream of synthesis has lured many in the past two centuries. One who seemed to live it was Joseph B. Soloveitchik.
Follow the MoneyWednesday, March 2, 2011 by Alex Joffe | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
The prestigious London School of Economics (LSE) is shocked—shocked—to discover that Muammar Qaddafi is a very bad man. So the once venerable institution is diverting some of the $2.5 million pledged through Qaddafi's son Saif al-Islam into a scholarship fund for Libyan students.
Jewish Philanthropy 2.0Wednesday, February 23, 2011 by Alex Joffe | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Jewish mega-donors are hardly news. It is also a commonplace that wealthy Jews allocate less than 25 percent of their giving to specifically Jewish causes. Of the two facts, the latter has understandably puzzled and frustrated fund raisers for Jewish causes. But is it really so mysterious?
Jewish-Christian Dialogue TodayMonday, February 21, 2011 by Yehudah Mirsky | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
How do today's Jews and Christians encounter one another? The most obvious way is in the countless interactions of Jewish and Christian colleagues and acquaintances in a host of daily settings, including exchanges on their respective religious attitudes and experiences.
Talmud: The Back StoryThursday, January 27, 2011 by Yehudah Mirsky | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
There is no getting away from the Babylonian Talmud. Love it, hate it, or both, this monumental work has been central to Jewish life for a millennium and more, managing time after time to find new readers and to summon new forms of reading.
Editors' Picks
Torah and Telos Jerome Gellman, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. A rational argument for taking one's religious text as divine revelation might have succeeded, were it not for the failure of the author's test-case: his justification for believing in a revealed Torah. (Interview with the book's author here.)
A Vast Right-Wing Jewish Conspiracy? Rafael Medoff, Jerusalem Post. Hearing a prominent Jewish historian claim that criticism of FDR's inaction during the Holocaust is the handiwork of disgruntled Likudniks, a leftist blogger took it upon himself to prove her wrong.
The Book That Drove Them Crazy Andrew Ferguson, Weekly Standard. Twenty-five years ago, a studious manuscript called Souls Without Longing was given a more commercial title and a print run of 10,000 copies. It soon was selling 25,000 copies a week, and its author was the most famous professor in the Western world.
Ghetto Seminaries Fred MacDowell, On the Main Line. No fooling: On April 1, 1906, The New-York Tribune published a long article about the "Jewish boys who risk health by long study in foul rooms"—including the heder that would become Yeshiva University.
Darwin and the Rabbis Michael Kay, Thinking through My Fingers. We're told that "religion" and "science" went head to head over evolution. But nineteenth-century rabbis, including Samson Raphael Hirsch, Hermann Adler, and Abraham Isaac Kook, were all willing to engage with Darwinism.
An Abundance of Haggadot Jewish Ideas Daily. Through the Haggadah, wrote the late Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, "the memory of the nation is annually revived . . . and the collective hope sustained." Yet precisely that sense of the collective seems absent from many of today's Haggadot, even the best of them.
Journey to Freedom Yocheved Golani, Jewish Press. In the the Koren Ethiopian Haggada, rare photos show the arduous, sometimes fatal journey through the Sudan to freedom, as well as initial interactions with modern technology.
Freedom Tales Yehudah Mirsky, Jewish Ideas Daily. From a medieval manuscript to the script for an interfaith seder, a new crop of Haggadot shows that the old words still hold their own.
Toeing the Church-State Line Julie Wiener, Jewish Week. Hebrew charter schools offer the chance to educate large numbers of American Jewish children in Hebrew and Israeli culture—at taxpayers' expense—and thus are making many inside and outside the Jewish world nervous.
Crowdsourcing the Constitution Walter Russell Mead, Via Meadia. "We the People" indeed—a new commentary on the U.S. Constitution draws its inspiration from an unlikely source.