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Why Is This Passover Different? – Ethiopian Pesach

Sharon Shalom

How does Ethiopian Jewry’s observance of Pesach differ from that of most Jews, and why? Are these differences a function of this community’s historic isolation or a matter of principle? And what can they teach...

ArticlesIssue 76 | March 2026

Gateway to the Mountain – Jews on the Mountain

Ben Shragge

Between the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus Mountains, the Jews of Derbent clung to their unique culture despite invaders, revolution, and civil war. Largely uprooted by 20th-century challenges, they still preserve the memory of the...

ArticlesIssue 61 | May 2022

Rivers of Poetry – Uri Zvi Greenberg

Akiva Goldstein

Few have been as versatile or lived lives as varied as Uri Zvi Greenberg. A revolutionary, anarchist poet who foresaw both the Arab massacre of Jews in 1929 and the Holocaust, Greenberg wandered between past,...

ArticlesIssue 60 | February 2022

Rabbinic But Different – Dura-Europos Synagogue

Haggai Misgav

The people and animals in the Dura-Europos murals might reflect a community’s disregard for rabbinic strictures but can’t be seen as evidence of non-rabbinic Judaism in third-century Syria Haggai Misgav Since its discovery in 1932,...

ArticlesIssue 60 | February 2022

Imperial Synagogue – Dura-Europos Synagogue

Haggai Olshanetsky

Once upon a time in southeastern Syria, the Roman and Sassanid-Persian empires battled over a city nestled among the dunes. Its ruins revealed a synagogue with some of the most exquisite murals ever seen. Who...

ArticlesIssue 60 | February 2022

Uphill Battle – Temple Mount: Modern Jewish Attitudes

Dotan Goren

Today most Jews visiting the Temple Mount are religious and of a certain stripe, but when the site opened to non-Muslims in the mid-19th century, it was generally secular Jewish tourists who seized the opportunity...

ArticlesIssue 61 | May 2022

Egypt’s Exodus – Egyptian Rule in Canaan

Assaf Avraham

Though there’s no evidence outside the Bible for the Jewish people’s sojourn in Egypt, historical and archaeological finds from the end of the late Bronze Age in the land of Israel indicate that Egyptian domination...

ArticlesIssue 76 | March 2026

Murder in the Holy City – Jacob Israel de Haan

Pini Dunner

Though Jacob de Haan’s assassination at the entrance to Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center shocked the Jewish world, the victim himself elicited little direct sympathy. What prompted London-based rabbi and maverick journalist Joseph Shapotshnick to...

ArticlesIssue 61 | May 2022

Tourists on the Battlefield – 1929 Arab Riots

Glenda M. Woolf

They weren’t partial to either Arabs or Jews. But when a group of British divinity students on a summer pilgrimage to the Holy Land found themselves caught up in Arab attacks on the Jewish population,...

ArticlesIssue 62 | September 2022

In Search of a Lost Poetess – Friha ben Adiba

Joseph Chetrit

Liturgical poetry, or piyut, plays a major role in the Sephardic heritage but has long been considered an exclusively male enterprise – until the recent discovery of a female poet from Morocco, whose life story...

ArticlesIssue 59 | November 2021

Moroccans in Zion – Avraham Muyal

Mordecai Naor

Surprisingly enough, the guiding hand behind eastern European Zionists’ early colonization efforts was a Moroccan Jew raised in Jaffa. He succeeded because, as the colonists discovered on arrival in Palestine, Moroccan Jews had gotten there...

ArticlesIssue 59 | November 2021

Articles

Why Is This Passover Different? – Ethiopian Pesach