Enlightenment

Enigmas of Modern Jewish Identity

Over the course of a lifetime facing modernity's conflicting demands, how might Jewishness affect the struggle to sustain identity, and how might this struggle mark the contours of Diaspora history?

Back When the Jews Built Like Jews

In December 1872, authorities in Florence halted elaborate plans for a grand synagogue and criticized the city's Jews—for not building more Jewishly.

Antisemitism: Obsession or Logic?

Robert Wistrich’s new book, From Ambivalence to Betrayal:The Left, the Jews, and Israel, does much to demonstrate that anti-Semitism was and is a fixture of the Left—but stops short of that conclusion.

A Pillar with a Past

Gil S. Perl’s The Pillar of Volozhin sheds light on the Netziv, one of Lithuanian Jewry's greatest leaders, whose own intellectual development is reflected throughout the yeshiva world today.

The Turning of the Torah Tide

“Torah Judaism today retains more of its youth than at any time since the Haskalah.”  Historian Marc Shapiro recently made this remark.  Can he possibly be correct?

Reform of Tradition, Tradition of Reform

Max Lilienthal’s life provides a lens through which we watch American Judaism, Reform Judaism in particular, struggle with the consequences of its own idiosyncratic condition.

Yeshiva Revolution

Shaul Stampfer, one of Israel's foremost experts on Eastern European Jewry, is the most unlikely of iconoclasts.  A thin, quiet, unassuming man, he gives the impression that he would have been happy as a simple melamed (elementary school teacher) in the shtetls he describes.

Moravian Morals for Montreal

When Montreal police entered the home of Amir Khadir, a member of Quebec’s parliament, they found a curiously revealing objet d’art: a parody of Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, with Khadir, in the position of Lady Liberty, standing triumphantly over the corpse of Quebec premier Jean Charest.

Out of the Well of the Past

Jewish history was once regularly portrayed as a march from pre-modern stasis to modern revolution and change. This picture held its attractions, offering clearly marked battle lines for later proponents on either side of the ongoing ideological struggles between traditionalists and modernizers. By now, however, we have been well instructed in the deceptive simplicity of all such efforts to impress order on the relentless flux of history, which so often dissolves the closer we look at it.