Arts & Culture


Pannonica

By Dan Friedman

Music, namely hearing Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight,” caused Nina Rothschild to abandon her family to embrace the vulnerable, dangerous world of New York bebop in the late 1940s. A documentary made by her great-niece provides testimony to Rothschild’s influence.Read More

Magen Tzedek: Model of the Jewish Future or Show Without an Audience?

By Jay Michaelson

The problem seems not to have changed. Back when I was at college, the egalitarian services couldn’t get a minyan, and so, while I didn’t like Orthodox liturgy, and didn’t approve of the mechitza (prayer barrier), I still schlepped up the extra flight of stairs to the traditional minyan, week after week. Whatever my personal preferences, it seemed that only Orthodox Jews cared enough to make the system work.Read More

Mahmoud Darwish: If He Were Another

By Jo-Ann Mort

Two summers ago, I dined at a Ramallah restaurant with a Fatah leader. I ordered Taibeh, the local beer, but my host chose Heineken, remarking: “I just dined with Mahmoud Darwish, and he told me, ‘My stomach knows no nationality.’”Read More

Internet: The Hatred Super-Highway

By Jordana Horn

“What’s the difference between Jews and Nazis? The Jews are guilty of the crimes they’re accused of.”: The boldfaced quotes are real. They were written within the past few months by people who believe they are true. They are quotes from hateful blogs and Web sites — some written in America, some abroad. Antisemitism pulses, alive and well, on the Internet.Read More

How, Why, Who Hates Us

By Jerome A. Chanes

Historian Victor Tcherikover used to say that there are few phenomena in history that have a history of 2,000 years. Antisemitism is one of those phenomena. The cultural antisemitism of the ancient world; Christian religious antisemitism; the racist forms of the modern era, beginning with Voltaire and culminating in the horrors of the destruction of European Jewry — all add to these the “new” antisemitism of radical Islam and virulent forms of “Israelophobia,” and you have a cluster of issues and events that we, in 2009, cannot adequately address. For scholars, it is not merely of theoretical interest to grapple with these issues, but it is also crucial to know how to face them, both now and in the future.Read More

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