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Issues 51-100

Old meets new by the Siloam Pool. Illustration using a photograph by Oren Cohen for Megalim Institute, City of David

Articles

Bull headed silver lyre from the royal cemetery of Ur, Iraq, circa 2500 BCE | Photo: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin

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

The commissions of inquiry found that very few children had been put up for adoption. What became of all the rest? A Yemenite family awaiting a checkup in the Hashed transit camp near Aden, December 1949 | Photo: David Eldan

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

Knightly armor was supposed to indicate high birth – but Brampton’s case was probably not the only exception. The Black Prince, Edward, prince of Wales, hero of England’s initial successes in the Hundred Years War, illustration from Charles Knight’s Old England – A Pictorial Museum, 1760

Breaking the Mold – Edward Brampton

Haggai Olshanetsky

A mariner, a knight, the governor of the Isle of Guernsey, and a nobleman with influence at the English and the Portuguese courts – Edward Brampton, the son of a Jewish blacksmith, defied the so-called strict hierarchy of late medieval soci

Jewish celebrities of the cantors’ golden age. Cantor Mordechai Hershman

Shul or Show? – Golden Age of Cantors

David Olivestone

The huge popularity of cantorial concerts and records during the first half of the 20th century turned the most talented cantors into celebrities. But did they cross the line from prayer to entertainment? David Olivestone A cent

He gave his all for Tel Aviv – and insisted on his due. Meir Dizengoff riding at the head of the Tel Aviv Purim parade, 1934 | Photo: Zoltan Kluger, Israel Government Press Office

The Sheriff of Tel Aviv – Meir Dizengoff

Ilan Shchori

While pioneers enthused over each new furrow plowed, Meir Dizengoff put his heart and soul into building and running the first new Jewish city in millennia – inspired not by the patriarchs, but by the French Riviera Ilan Shchori

Portrait of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady. This 19th-century engraving, apparently produced by artist Boris Schatz, was based on a drawing purportedly dating back to the rebbe’s imprisonment in 1798 | Courtesy of the National Library of Israel

Festivals of Freedom – Jailed Chabad Leaders

Netanel Lederberg

The horrors of imprisonment in czarist and Stalinist Russia were seared into the memory of all who survived their sentences. Few, however, celebrated their release as joyously as the Lubavitcher rebbes, whose followers mark these occasions

Both in Europe and in the land of Israel, Hasidim were drawn to urban centers. Kerosene peddler on a Tel Aviv sidewalk, circa 1920 | Photo: Ze’ev Aleksandrowicz, Pikiwiki

Tel Aviv’s Not-So-Black Hats – Hasidic Tel Aviv

Menachem Keren-Kratz

The city that never sleeps might now epitomize secular Israel, but for decades it was the country’s Hasidic capital – and Zionist too! Menachem Keren-Kratz Shoppers on Tel Aviv’s fashionable Shenkin Street and high-tech workers