Neologisms, words newly coined, are as necessary to language as water to land. New inventions, institutions, patterns of behavior require new words to describe them. Nor need all neologisms describe new phenomena. Some are required to cover long-established phenomena that have called out for but…
The Pulitzer-winning novelist leaves newly ordained rabbis feeling isolated with his ranting about inclusion.
Looking back at Philip Roth.
I am not typically late for things. Except, one morning in March of last year, I was running late to a doctor’s appointment for my wife and me. She was already there, having let me sleep in since I had been up late the night before. Not for work or anything. But to watch Team Israel in the World…
In the late 1930s, or perhaps it was as late as 1940, my father and uncle, the screenwriters Philip and Julius Epstein, sought to join the American armed forces. The Army turned them away; it apparently considered their anti-fascism premature. That, at any rate, is family lore, and I have every…
January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day—the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945.
It’s not every day that a quarrel breaks out among friends over something that happened in 1858. But so it was in the second week of January when First Things published online a review from its February issue of the memoirs of Edgardo Mortara, a man born into a Jewish family in Bologna in 1851 who…
It’s not every day that a quarrel breaks out among friends over something that happened in 1858. But so it was in the second week of January when First Things published online a review from its February issue of the memoirs of Edgardo Mortara, a man born into a Jewish family in Bologna in 1851 who…
Former White House aide Sebastian Gorka vehemently denied charges from a Democratic congressman that he endorsed a Hungarian neo-Nazi political party during a congressional hearing Wednesday.
Editor's note: Kayla Moore told AL.com two days after this story published she was referring to another lawyer the family has employed, Martin Wishnatsky. This story has been corrected to note the change.
Latkes, jelly doughnuts, and chocolate coins filled the White House last week for the president’s annual Hanukkah Party. But this Hanukkah was different from all previous Hanukkahs.
In a March 2016 speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference, Donald Trump declared that if he became president, he would “move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem.” His choice of phrase—“eternal capital”—perhaps bears some…
I was recently reading The Whole Truth and Nothing But, a 1963 memoir by the legendary gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, and I came across an interesting passage in which the producer Samuel Goldwyn (né Szmuel Gelbfisz) tells Hopper flatly, "You can't have a Jew playing a Jew. It wouldn't work on the…
In 1992, the exiled Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide spoke to Jewish leaders in New York City. Having studied for three years in Jerusalem, he spoke to them in Hebrew as well as English. Aristide was slightly shocked to discover, after the talk, that he was not understood: Most of the…
Ralph Lerner is a man of rare learning, biting wit, and deep thought. His virtues are well known to generations of students and colleagues at the University of Chicago, although he is not as prominent in the wider world as he deserves to be. The publication of this book should induce many more…
Ralph Lerner is a man of rare learning, biting wit, and deep thought. His virtues are well known to generations of students and colleagues at the University of Chicago, although he is not as prominent in the wider world as he deserves to be. The publication of this book should induce many more…
On January 13, 2017, a German regional court ruled that a lower court had been correct to find no anti-Semitism in the attempt by a group of Muslim men to burn down a synagogue in the city of Wuppertal.
On January 13, 2017, a German regional court ruled that a lower court had been correct to find no anti-Semitism in the attempt by a group of Muslim men to burn down a synagogue in the city of Wuppertal.
Founded in 2007, the Community Security Service (CSS) is a low-profile, nonprofit organization based in New York City and concerned with protection of American Jewish institutions and public activities. CSS has trained thousands of volunteers in professional security methods, provides physical…
Over at The Tower, San Diego State University student Anthony Berteaux describes the experience of two Jewish undergraduates who attended the University of California's Students of Color Conference—a self-branded "safe space"—only to be met with overpowering anti-Semitism.
And the King of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives . . . Shifra and Puah . . . If it be a son, then ye shall kill him . . . But the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the men children alive. – Exodus I, 15. Forcing women to undergo abortions against…
The Democratic party has been plunged into turmoil over an email focusing on, of all things, whether or not Bernie Sanders believes in God. It's a remarkable turn of events, considering that Sanders has tried so hard to avoid talking about that very subject.
Since the Charlie Hebdo affair a year-and-a-half ago and the gratuitous, as it seemed, attack on the kosher supermarket in Paris, the condition of Jews in France has been a subject of much discussion and concern, and not only in France. An article in the London Telegraph immediately following those…
The enemies of Israel neither slumber nor sleep. They include not only the technically competent barbarians of Iran, exuberantly aggressive with the prospect of nuclear weapons and the $150 billion "signing bonus" paid them for signing a sham agreement with America; not only Iran's proxies to the…
Secretary of State John Kerry has done it again: even more foolish and offensive statements about the terrorist attacks in Paris a year ago.
Antisemitism has never been an easy subject for America’s foreign-policy establishment. Read through State Department telegrams and Central Intelligence Agency operational and intelligence cables on the Middle East and you will seldom find it discussed, even though Jew-hatred—not just…
Secretary of State John Kerry has often spoken to the Muslim world during his tenure, particularly during the past year as negotiations with Iran have intensified and conflict with the Islamic State has escalated. But what Kerry has not said during the past twelve months is also significant. A…
Tablet has one of the best articles I've seen from Paris, capturing the mood of French Jews--and the meaning for them of the state of Israel. Here are excerpts:
Brooklyn
The new Mosaic essay by Robert W. Nicholson is about the evangelicals, Israel, and American Jews:
Yoram Hazony is frustrated. A scholar at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, he has sought to bring Judaism in conversation with Western thought. The West, he believes, has not returned the favor.
When Alice fell through her Oxford rabbit hole in 1865, she landed in a world in which the hidden elements of her imagination took on an oppressive materiality. The unknown land revealed to Alice might have changed her readers’ perception of childhood, if only they could have decoded what Alice…
Haaretz reported that in a private meeting with Jewish leaders earlier this week, President Obama said (in the Israeli paper's words) he "probably knows about Judaism more than any other president." Now, Ron Kampeas has more details of the meeting "based on detailed notes by a person in attendance…
On May 7, 2012, the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), the largest organization of rabbis in the United States, approved a resolution recognizing that the Health and Human Services (HHS) regulation that mandates employers provide access to contraceptives, abortifacient drugs, and sterilizations…
On his nightly television show recently, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell said that Texas governor Rick Perry is not suitable to be president of the United States because of his connection to one man — Pastor John Hagee of San Antonio, Texas.
Hank Greenberg The Hero Who Didn’t Want to Be One by Mark Kurlansky Yale, 192 pp., $25
On June 5, 2009, The Washington Post posed the following question in a readers’ poll: “Do you think expressions of faith -- and not just satiric references to religion -- belong on the comics page?” Of the 257 participants, 70 percent answered “YES - the funnies are all about personal expression,”…