Home > Issues > Issue 53 | July 2020

Issue 53 | July 2020

Articles

Echoes of Sorrow – Mesopotamian Laments 

Uri Gabbay

Mesopotamian kingdoms rose and fell, but cultic laments of doom remained a constant ritual. What was their purpose, and what can we learn from their echoes in the biblical book of Lamentations? Uri Gabbay Keening – singing prais

Conspiracy or Contagion? – Israel’s Lost Yemenite Children 

Yechiel Michael Barilan

In the early days of the State of Israel, numerous infants born to Yemenite immigrants disappeared after hospitalization. Many families have long suspected that their children were secretly transferred to adoptive families. A new medical st

Till Death Do Us Part – Graveyard Weddings

Sara Barnea

Two orphans are about to tie the knot. But the wedding procession leads to the local cemetery. What was behind this strange 19th-century custom, and what storm brewed in its wake? Sara Barnea On the first day of Nisan, 1909, a J

Columns

Portrait of a People | Touring the Land

Naomi Samuel

Naomi Samuel Tiberias, View from the Walls withSafed in the DistanceChalk on paperTiberias, 1839 David

Book Review | Social Vision

Sara Jo Ben-Zvi

Rooting the Rebbe’s far-reaching campaigns directly in the Baal Shem Tov’s ideology, a sociologist explains why the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s vision was best suited to and carried out from the land of the free Sara Jo Ben-Zvi Social