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History


Summoned Home Summoned Home
Thursday, November 18, 2010 by Allan Nadler | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

In June 1934, the celebrated American Yiddish poet Jacob Glatstein (a/k/a Yankev Glatshteyn, 1896-1971) received an urgent summons to return to his native Lublin, Poland, where his mother lay at death's door. At the precise moment when so many Jews were desperately trying to make the reverse journey, Glatstein found himself on an unanticipated and almost certainly unwanted return home.
A Jewish Renaissance? A Jewish Renaissance?
Monday, November 15, 2010 by Yehudah Mirsky | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

In recent years Israel has become a vast open-air laboratory for experiments in Judaism, re-fashioning rituals, reading old texts through new lenses, scrambling and fracturing familiar dichotomies between secular and religious. Secular yeshivot, mainstream performers singing medieval Hebrew hymns, non-denominational "prayer communities" in hip Tel Aviv, kabbalistic therapy movements, Judaism festivals on once-socialist kibbutzim—something is going on here, but what?
The Non-Zionist The Non-Zionist
Monday, November 8, 2010 by Yehudah Mirsky | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

The YIVO Institute in New York recently marked the 150th birthday of perhaps the most eminent among its founders: the historian and nationalist ideologue Simon Dubnow (1860-1941). Massively influential in its time, Dubnow's historical writing has been overshadowed by the work of later generations of scholars. In the meantime, the cause he championed—Diaspora Jewish nationalism—was throttled by the Holocaust.  Yet the man and his ideas may be ripe for rediscovery.
The Warrior Rabbi The Warrior Rabbi
Friday, November 5, 2010 by Aryeh Tepper | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

Praise of military virtue, prominent in the Bible, is almost non-existent in the Talmud, which, in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the Jews by the Romans, either ignores wartime feats or re-interprets them as allegories of intellectual or spiritual prowess. The Talmud's relative silence on the subject would prove enduring. Until the second half of the 20th century, with few exceptions, military virtue was consistently depreciated in traditional Jewish thought.
The Mad Mystic of Bratslav The Mad Mystic of Bratslav
Monday, November 1, 2010 by Allan Nadler | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav (1772-1811) is the strangest and most paradoxical leader in the history of Hasidism, and one of its most original, albeit mad, geniuses.  Nahman has been an object of both literary fascination and considerable scholarly research. He also shares center stage with Franz Kafka (1888-1924) in Rodger Kamenetz's Burnt Books.
The Azeri Exception The Azeri Exception
Friday, October 29, 2010 by Aryeh Tepper | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

Someone forgot to tell the republic of Azerbaijan that Jews and Muslims cannot live together in peace. Somewhere between twenty and forty thousand Jews reside in that Shiite country, which sits on Iran's northern border and enjoys diplomatic, economic, and military ties with Israel. Can this last, and for how long?
Jews and Their Historians Jews and Their Historians
Wednesday, October 27, 2010 by Yehudah Mirsky | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

Over the last two centuries, Jewish identity has assumed an often bewildering variety of forms—religious, political, social, and cultural. One form, insufficiently recognized as such, is the study of Jewish identity, especially as filtered through Jewish history. Its main means of expression is the academic enterprise known as Jewish Studies, a field that in turn comprises a variety of specific schools and thinkers.
Was Lenin Jewish? Was Lenin Jewish?
Monday, October 25, 2010 by Ruth R. Wisse | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

The Bolshevik Revolution undertook to change history. In line with that aim, its leaders set out to control the writing of history. The scholar Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, who was born and studied in the Soviet Union, learned the hard way that history is shaped by how information is managed and made available. Confronting the challenge head-on, he has published a book, Lenin's Jewish Question, about the ancestry of the man who masterminded the 1917 Revolution and became the iron-fisted dictator of the early Soviet state. 
Under Islam Under Islam
Thursday, October 21, 2010 by Aryeh Tepper | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

In the two decades following the establishment of the state of Israel, approximately 850,000 Jews were forcibly driven out of Arab lands. Their expulsion marked the beginning of the end of 2,500 years of Jewish life in North Africa, the greater Middle East, and the Persian Gulf. Until recently, their story has been largely unrecognized and untold in the English-speaking world.
Bi-Polar Europe Bi-Polar Europe
Tuesday, October 19, 2010 by Elliot Jager | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

Last month, Western intelligence services uncovered a plot by Arab men holding European citizenship to carry out simultaneous shooting strikes in France, Germany, and Britain.  The United States apparently thwarted the attacks in a targeted killing campaign using drone aircraft against suspected Taliban- and al-Qaeda-backed terrorists along the Pakistan-Afghan border.
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Editors' Picks
After Tal Jerusalem Post. The "melting pot" ethos, which aimed to resocialize young soldiers, has been replaced by a softer, multicultural approach—as a result of which, more Haredim have been integrated into the IDF, and more are joining.
Arendt in Jerusalem Sol Stern, City Journal. With their monumental errors of political and moral judgment, Hannah Arendt's writings on Zionism, Israel, and the Holocaust have metastasized into a destructive legacy.
The Bad Samaritan Amy-Jill Levine, Biblical Archeology Society. You can't understand the story of the Good Samaritan without knowing that a Samaritan was the last kind of person to whom a Jew would look for help.
Analyzing Ashkelon Sam Roberts, New York Times. Science is revolutionizing the study of ancient Ashkelon—revealing mysterious cylinders as parts of ancient looms, proving that what we thought were palaces may really have been stables.
The Last Resort Jordana Horn, Forward. Jews may have deserted the Catskills for the Vineyard and the Hamptons. But one of the great resorts, Kutsher's, refuses to go quietly. Meet Kutsher's Tribeca.
Shrine Online Sohrab Ahmari, Tablet. Unable to restore a shrine with a prominent Star of David in Iran, a U.S. organization and an Iranian-American architect are reviving the site in cyberspace.
Minority Report Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, Middle East Forum. The identity of Middle Eastern Christians has been shaped more by linguistic and cultural Arabization than it has by a simple desire to avoid persecution.
Why the Nazis Hated Jazz J.J. Gould, Atlantic. For one thing, there are the "Jewishly gloomy lyrics," set against the "hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the barbarian races." Dig?
Is the Kotel Plaza a Synagogue? David Golinkin, G’vanim. How should the State of Israel respond to the increasing religious policing around the Western Wall that is slowly but surely turning the area into a Haredi synagogue? (PDF)
The Historian, the Diplomat, and the Spy Clifford D. May, National Review. Bernard Lewis, Uri Lubrani, and Meir Dagan see that disenchanted Iranians may offer the last, best hope for the Muslim world—and for winding down the global war against the West.