Pre-Modern & Modern

Easter, Passover, and the West Side Story that Wasn’t

Late in 1948, in the early stages of his collaboration with Jerome Robbins on the musical that would become West Side Story, Leonard Bernstein wrote in his diary: "Jerry R. called today with a noble idea: a modern version of Romeo and Juliet set in slums at the coincidence of Easter-Passover celebrations. Feelings run high between Jews and Catholics. . . . "

Eichmann Goes Digital

This year, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Eichmann trial, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, together with the Israel State Archives, has posted to YouTube an extraordinary series of videos: over 200 hours of courtroom sessions and testimonies in the original Hebrew, German, and Yiddish, as well as a parallel set with English voiceover. What do they tell us?

A Chosen People?

Within months of Israel's lightning victory in the June 1967 war, French President Charles de Gaulle was asked for his judgment of the dramatically new situation created by the triumph of the Jewish state over its enemies. Still smarting from Israel's refusal to heed his advice and wait passively for the Arab armies to attack, de Gaulle labeled the Jews "an elite people, sure of themselves and domineering."

Clash of Civilizations

The death toll in Afghanistan has passed the two-dozen mark in the riots "inspired" by Pastor Terry Jones's burning of a Quran in Florida. The grisly political theater has served its purpose.

“We Love Death”

In 2007, two years before he killed thirteen people and wounded twenty-nine at Fort Hood, Texas, Nidal Malik Hasan prepared a slide show for his fellow Army doctors on the subject of Islam. One of his last points read: "We love death more than you love life!"

Gandhi and the Jews

A new book about Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) has set off stormy protests in India for implying that the country's founding father was bisexual. That's only the beginning of it.

Gaza Endgame?

A March 26 meeting in Ramallah between an unofficial delegation of West Bank Hamas "parliamentarians" and Mahmoud Abbas, chairman of the Palestinian Authority and leader of the Fatah party, was ostensibly about reconciling the two factions.  Actually it was about much more.

Shakespeare, Much Improved?

One of the few things people think they know about Yiddish theater in America is that once upon a time there was a production, probably of King Lear, advertised as "translated and much improved." Joel Berkowitz's history, Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage (2002), quotes the line but never gives an attribution, which suggests that nobody ever actually said it. But someone might have.

The Fate of Muslim Moderates

The recent uprisings in the Middle East seemed, at least at first, to send a reassuring signal to Western observers: not only did genuinely moderate Muslims exist, and not only were they capable of finding a political voice, but there was reason to hope that, given time to organize and grow in strength, they might succeed in winning out against the voices of repression and Islamist extremism.

Purim Puzzles

Purim, Judaism's strangest holiday (which this year falls on March 20), is prescribed by what may be the strangest book in the Hebrew Bible, the scroll (m'gilah) of Esther. Two public readings of the book, one at night and the other in the morning, tell a story of Persian palace intrigue in the fifth century B.C.E., a recitation accompanied by the holiday's decidedly unspiritual noisemaking, tippling, and masquerade.