This article is dedicated in memory of Haim Stier, who passed away in the course of our combined efforts to transfer his extensive collection of New Year cards to the Israel Museum. (Published at Issue...
- - House on Endless Waters Emuna Elon Atria Books (Simon & Schuster), 2020, 320 pages “Those waters have already flowed onwards” is the practical yet poetic statement with which the fictitious Dutch heroine of Emuna...
- - Voice behind the Iron Curtain // Zvi Golany Israel’s USSR Liaison Bureau saw Nehama Lipshitz as its one-man “Light Music Department,” broadcasting directly to the heart of Russian Jewry. Ditching a Lithuanian opera...
Opera singer Nehama Lipshitz defied the Soviets not just by performing in Yiddish and Hebrew but by collaborating with Israeli undercover agencies in the USSR כותב Deep in the Soviet Union, where any public demonstration...
In loving memory of Dr. Moshe Avital, Holocaust scholar, educator, author, and speaker, whose unwavering faith, courage, and resilience inspired so many. Lessons from History – innovative educational Jewish history programs Seventeen years ago, as...
49 - The Price of Dissent // Moti Benmelech Uriel da Costa paid many times over for the changes he made in his life. He sacrificed a comfortable livelihood in Portugal for the true faith he found in...
48 - The Dark Hours // Anat Kutner Though sleep and sex are hardly the stuff of history, a surprising amount can be gleaned from rabbinic responsa dealing with medieval Jewish sleeping habits. With candlelight...
What can Princeton University’s Lives of Great Religious Books series possibly add to the reams already written on the enormous religious and political influence of the book of Exodus, particularly Michael Walzer’s classic Exodus and...
The Rock of Destruction Location: Jerusalem Hills Near Eshtaol and Zor’a, atop a barren, stony hill along the road to Jerusalem, a lone rock juts out. Here, according to a legend recorded in the early...
Nowhere to Go In 1950, Jerusalem gained a new pilgrimage site: the Lion’s Cave, located in the Muslim graveyard of the city’s Mamilla neighborhood. The man responsible for this innovation was the director of Israel’s...
The Curator's Vision Shmuel Zanwil Kahane, director of Israel's Ministry of Religious Affairs from 1949 to 1979, possessed a keen sense of history. Enormous changes had overtaken the Jewish people, demanding a narrative beyond the...