Visual Moment // Odessa
“To this day I remember, feel, and love this town…I love this town because I grew up in it, was happy, melancholy, and dreamy in it. Passionately and singularly dreamy.”
“To this day I remember, feel, and love this town…I love this town because I grew up in it, was happy, melancholy, and dreamy in it. Passionately and singularly dreamy.”
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.”
Just outside of Hartford proper, Jewish families have intermingled with new immigrants over the years to form an unusually cohesive community in the suburbs of Greater Hartford.
Located just outside Jerusalem’s old city walls, Mount Zion is home to King David’s tomb, the room of the last supper and a former mosque. Today, a tangle of neglectful Israeli authorities has allowed the site to become a beacon for ultra-nationalist religious Jews.
American Jews shouldn’t be disappointed that Israel’s not a liberal wonderland.
David Cesarani’s succinct new biography of preeminent Victorian statesman and novelist Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), Disraeli: The Novel Politician, challenges the commonly held view of Disraeli as having played a heroic role in Jewish history.
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.
In 1967 a 29-year-old Israeli-born Canadian architect by the name of Moshe Safdie gained international recognition for his groundbreaking, visionary design for high-quality, affordable urban housing.
How “gentile” fell out of favor.
Ethiopian food, famous for its spicy stews and the spongy flatbread called injera, burst onto the international food scene—especially in the United States—in the 1970s and 1980s, when thousands of Ethiopians fled political turmoil in their home country.