History

Emancipation & Its Discontents

“One day [Jews are] being completely segregated, [and the] next thing you know, Napoleon comes through town, tears down the ghetto gates, and we can do whatever we like, sort of.” Thus the author Michael Goldfarb, describing the thesis of his recently published book, Emancipation. Especially in the cases of France and Germany, Goldfarb writes, there is no denying the profoundly liberating energies that were unleashed when the Jews, like a spring suddenly uncoiled, were enabled to join the larger societies in which they lived. Nor can there be any proper understanding of the larger course of modernity apart from this...

A Talmud for Today

In Israel and the United States, high-level Talmud study thrives today with an intensity unmatched since the days of the great East European yeshivot. Yet to most English readers the Talmud, the essential Jewish compendium of legal and narrative discussion, remains a closed book—or rather 63 books. All the more reason, then, to welcome a new and expertly edited 900-page selection from the “sea of the Talmud.” What if a dip into the ocean doesn’t suffice? Two English-language editions have come to the aid of the student unversed in the original languages or modes of rabbinic reasoning: a partial translation...

Festival of Lights

Hanukkah, the eight-day holiday whose Hebrew dates are 25 Kislev - 2 Tevet, begins this year on the evening of December 11. It commemorates an ancient victory at once military, political, social, and religious. Militarily, the victory, which took place in Judea in 165 B.C.E., saw the routing of the forces of the Greek Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes by a rebel Jewish army under the leadership of Judah Maccabee. Politically, it ushered in a prolonged period of independent Jewish rule under the Hasmonean dynasty. Socially, it betokened the triumph of traditionalist Jews over the assimilating Hellenizers in their midst. Religiously,...

Asymmetric Lawfare

The Goldstone Report on Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war, endorsed by the UN General Assembly on November 5, has taken on a life of its own in the court of world public opinion. Increasingly, both its enthusiasts and its detractors see it as a weapon, even more potent than the UN’s Zionism-Racism resolution of November 1975, in a campaign to render illegitimate the very existence of the state of Israel. So loud has the drumbeat over the Report become, and so widening its repercussions, that an entire website—cited in the first item below—is needed to collect the facts and to...