Has The Whole World Been Blessed?
Let’s start where the story starts. Abram is living in Ur of the Chaldees when, without explanation or preamble, God – the God of history – says…
Let’s start where the story starts. Abram is living in Ur of the Chaldees when, without explanation or preamble, God – the God of history – says…
It feels like forever – so changed are the times! – but it’s only been two days at this writing. Starting in the early hours of October…
Guy MacLean Rogers. For the Freedom of Zion: The Great Revolt of Jews Against Romans, 66–74 CE. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. The Jewish War…
Defamation tends to obliterate the erotic appeal of the person being defamed. That’s one reason it’s so infuriatingly irreparable. It makes the victim seem undesirable. We are…
Nowadays, on Wednesday evenings, I drive to the local Chabad, when I can manage it, to study the Parshah (section from the Pentateuch being read during that…
Disaggregation. It’s the polysyllabic term for what I need to do: separate out and deal with the present pileup of life challenges, each of which is new…
“During the Reformation the struggle was really within the church, today we struggle with the secular: secularism.” - Hans Ehrenberg to Karl Barth 22.2.1934[1] “The future is…
Jerry Muller. Professor Apocalypse: The many Lives of Jacob Taubes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022. This well-crafted, exhaustively researched, intellectually balanced biography of Jacob Taubes may…
Are we making a big mistake? Couldn’t it be Tom, Dick, or Susie instead? Well, no. Those three friends are all palpable, visible, leave imprints when they…
The Wall Street Journal recently published a rather unfortunate guest essay by Andrew Doran entitled “Christians Need to Confront Anti-Semitism” in the paper’s House of Worship column.…
When I was a child, the grownups around me held all kinds of beliefs and I wished I could be like them. Failing that, I hoped they…
This year, the climactic commemorative celebration days for each religion actually did overlap. Which raised questions about their possible relationship, or at least how they stand today…
Throughout the Christian world, except in Germanic-language countries, Easter is known as Passover. The Passover, of course, is a Jewish holy festival—it marks the deliverance of the…
The other day, I spoke by telephone to my Israeli first cousin. In her young days, she worked for a British military unit stationed in the region…
Strauss, Spinoza & Sinai. Edited by Jeffrey Bloom, Alec Goldstein, and Gil Student. New York: Kodesh Press, 2022. Let’s begin with a story. As an undergraduate…