Pre-Modern & Modern
EasterThursday, April 1, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Around the world this weekend, Christians are preparing to celebrate Easter, the holiday marking the death and resurrection of Jesus and the culmination of the period of penitence that began with Ash Wednesday on February 17. The first bishops in Jerusalem were Jews, and so the early Christian community commemorated the Feast of the Resurrection on the fourteenth day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, coinciding with the Jewish festival of Passover. In Temple times, the essential rite of Passover was the slaughter of a paschal lamb; the Christian Bible explicitly tied this ritual with Rome's crucifixion of Jesus:...
Was Dostoevsky a Scoundrel?The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), rightly known as a peerless master of psychological fiction, a fierce anti-socialist polemicist, an anti-romantic with a pulsingly romantic commitment to prophetic religion, and a dramatist of moral ideas without compare since the English poet John Milton, also happened to harbor an ugly fixation on the Jews.
It Isn’t Even PastThursday, January 7, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
The recent theft and recovery of the sign Arbeit Macht Frei from the gate of Auschwitz, and the emotional responses elicited by the incident, drive home just how deeply embedded the Holocaust and its imagery remain in contemporary consciousness. No doubt, this world-historical event will long continue to occupy a central place in human memory—along with, unfortunately, whatever permutations, distortions, and outright falsifications time will add to those that have already accumulated in the overheated political rhetoric of our own age. That is why, here and now, as we enter perhaps the final decade of the event's living memory, the issue...
Editors' Picks
The Unbreakable Muslim Brotherhood Eric Trager, Foreign Affairs. To understand the Brotherhood's prospects in Egypt's upcoming elections, one has to understand the intensely disciplined organization itself.
In Tiktin, Without Jews Daniel Gordis, Jerusalem Post. When it comes to European attitudes toward the Jewish people, what, in the end, has changed since the Holocaust? Clearly, not enough.
Telling It Like It Wasn't Ari L. Goldman, Jewish Week. Twenty years after the notorious anti-Semitic riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a former New York Times reporter relates how his paper stubbornly persisted in mischaracterizing the events as a "racial clash."
Religious Unfreedom Reuters. A new global survey shows increasing hostility to religious practice–with Jews, at less than one percent of the globe's population, experiencing restrictions or harassment in 75 countries.
Cretins against Israel David Aaronovitch, Jewish Chronicle. On Gilad Atzmon, Alan Hart, and other fixtures on Britain's media circuit of anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish bilge.
Next Year in Worms Michael Brenner, H-Net.
The place where Rashi (1040–1105) studied and where the oldest European synagogue stood is now devoid of a Jewish community; but the memory lives on, if selectively.
Zooming in on Israel Omri Ceren, Contentions. Think that lately the American media have become obsessed with the Jewish state? A new academic study shows that the obsession goes all the way back to 1950.
UNESCO's Revisionism Giulio Meotti, Ynet. Mired in anti-Jewish prejudice, the UN's cultural body classifies Rachel's tomb and Hebron's Cave of the Patriarchs as mosques—and the great Jewish scholar and philosopher Maimonides as a Muslim.
My Australia Ayelet Dekel, Midnight East. Through the life of a young boy raised as a Polish Catholic, a new film explores the postwar generation in Europe and its relation to Jews and (sometimes hidden) Jewish identity.
A Test for Arab Reformers Emanuele Ottolenghi, Haaretz. State-sanctioned lies about Israel and the West have a long history in the Arab world; why not open the archives at last, and let the truth spring forth?