When Rosenwald decided to give away hundreds of thousands of dollars to mark his fiftieth birthday, Booker T. Washington encouraged him to donate a portion of the money to build schools for African American children in the segregated south.
I decided to to seek out and capture images of the place in Eastern Europe where my Jewish grandfather and namesake Eli (pronounced “Ellie”) had come from.
Today, the Jews of Cuba, once called a remnant of the 15,000-strong community, demonstrate a phenomenon of rebirth and reinvention.
When Berkeley professor Daniel Matt was approached to translate the Zohar, he was more than a little hesitant.
I was at that peace rally in Tel Aviv, 22 years ago, when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. And for most years since, I have marked that date by attending memorial rallies in that same square. But this year, I won’t go to the annual rally in the square.
The Ten Commandments are appropriately easy to understand, except for Number Ten.
During the mid 19th century, the island’s Jewish population reached 900, but after much emigration, by World War II only around 300 Jews were left, all in Hania.
They weren’t just Jews but Jewish athletes, going about their professional lives in a strange city, as the Israelis had been doing a day earlier.
Iosef’s version of a “safe space” is a filthy, unheated Jewish dorm where students occasionally die of tuberculosis, or a lecture on a random topic in a hall where he can duck in and hide while running from his attackers—for a full five minutes, until they find him and drag him out. As Iosef puts it one afternoon, “I received two punches during today’s lectures and I took eight pages of notes. Good value, for two punches.” Microaggressions, indeed.
Blond and rather slender for its type, a pickle barrel stands by the takeout counter of the famous Washington, DC delicatessen Wagshal’s. Lined with plastic, it may satisfy a certain nostalgia but amounts to no more than a storage unit on the bulk-bin grocery aisle—a pale iteration of the big-bellied, oak casks I remember from my childhood.
