In September, Josh Marshall of the online political news outlet Talking Points Memo reached for an unexpected metaphor to express his disgust at Donald Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric…
A lexicographic tour de force, the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary, published this year by Indiana University Press, is an expedition through the layers of a language spoken by rebbes and poets, nurses and prostitutes, schoolchildren and soldiers…
When Academy Award-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow appeared on NBC’s hit show “Who Do You Think You Are?” she was delighted to discover that her paternal great-great-great grandfather, Tzvi Hirsch, was a prominent rabbi, kabbalist and purported miracle-worker in Novogrod, Poland…
When biblical scholar Elsie Stern lectures about the ancient world at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, the first thing she does is hold up a Bible and tell her students, “For most of the first 3,000 years that these words were around, if you said ‘Bible,’ no one would have any idea what you were talking about.”
Religious seekers are as old as religion itself. But it wasn’t until mid-20th-century America that there was a full-fledged, organized movement of Jews who moved from less observant to more observant—and a name for them. Behold, the birth of the baal teshuvah.
Technology inexplicably fails us often enough to need a word for the occasion, and glitch has slipped in to fill the void. Newspaper headlines routinely illustrate the word’s versatility and popularity. When thousands of travelers find themselves stranded: “Computer glitch cancels East Coast flights.” When a much-anticipated website launch screeches to a halt: “HealthCare.gov’s glitches prompt…
These days, all eyes are on what many are calling the new anti-Semitism, arising from both far-right and far-left politics, radical Islam and virulent anti-Zionist ideologies. But the old anti-Semitism isn’t forgotten—a 2013 Anti-Defamation League poll showed that 26 percent of Americans believe that “Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus.”
