Allan Nadler

National News

Community News

International News

Israel News

Arts & Culture

Fast Forward

The Shmooze

Forward Forum

Editorial

Tariq Ramadan Gets a Hero’s Welcome, and Cold Shoulders, at Religion Scholars Confab

By Allan Nadler

Swiss-born Muslim scholar and public intellectual Tariq Ramadan has for decades been a lightning rod for controversy. He was barred from entry to America by the Patriot Act’s “ideological exclusion provision,” and then on account of his financial contributions to two Hamas charities. Even so, he took center stage at the American Academy of Religion’s annual conference, this year held in Montreal — allowing him to attend.Read More

‘Zion, Shall You Not Beseech’

By Allan Nadler

A heady era of student activism permeated my undergraduate years at McGill University in the early 1970s. Jewish university students across North America were passionately involved on numerous political fronts, none evoking more ardor than the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry. At SSSJ rallies in front of the Montreal Consulate of the Soviet Union, we would defiantly chant our unofficial anthem, a single line from the vast Diwan (collected works) of Judah Halevi (1075–1141), the most prolific Hebrew poet of the medieval Islamic world.Read More

Fiery Pulpits On the Home Front

By Allan Nadler

In his semiautobiographical masterwork, “Mercy of a Rude Stream,” the late novelist Henry Roth recalled his Uncle Louie’s little kitchen-table “sermon” that, mainly to his mortified mother, justified his decision to join the American army in the First World War: “It’s natural for a child here in America to want to be a soldier. My two boys also want to be soldiers. It isn’t Galitzia where they cut off a boy’s toe so he won’t be conscripted… we Jews did that to a thousand, thousand infant boys to keep them out of the military, that they won’t have to eat pork, or most treife of all, to go into battle — and who knew? — at times against other Jews, fellow Jews in the opposing army. Why? We had no country, no?”Read More

Absence and Presence

By Allan Nadler

When John McCain was finally forced to reject publicly Reverend John Hagee’s support, he explicitly condemned some of the Christian leader’s most provocative views. Among them was Hagee’s professed belief that the prophet Jeremiah (of ancient Israel, not Chicago) warned of Hitler’s destruction of European Jewry, and that the Holocaust was a necessary prelude to the creation of Israel as well as a punishment to the Jews, for their deafness toward the Zionists’ exhortations from the late 19th century on, to abandon Europe for the Holy Land.Read More

A Sad, Searching Soul

By Allan Nadler

Among its many gifts, Ben-Zion Gold’s modest and moving chronicle of a Hasidic boy coming of age in pre-Holocaust Poland affords readers a bracing reprieve from the cynicism generated by a recent plague of phony, self-aggrandizing memoirs — from James Frey’s hair-raising tall tale of addiction, “A Million Little Pieces,” with its “Marathon Man”-inspired nonsense of undergoing dental surgery without anesthesia in a Nazi-style rehab center, to Binjamin Wilkomirski and Misha Defonseca’s Holocaust hoaxes.Read More


 

Most Read Articles