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Issues 51-100

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The Soviets’ solution to the “Jewish problem” was to send Jewish masses to develop the Russian Far East. Sign at the entrance to Birobidzhan, capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region | Photo: Anna Yerushenko/AFP/Getty Images

Designing a New Jew – Birobidzhan

Ber Kotlerman

In 1928, the Soviets chose to establish an autonomous Jewish region east of Chinese Manchuria, with the city of Birobidzhan as its capital. As in the other Jewish homeland under construction at much the same time, Bauhaus architects played

Uri Zvi Greenberg had the stormy temperament of a stereotypical redhead, a quality that dominates this portrait by Siona Tagger, who captured the likenesses of many leading Zionists in Mandate Palestine. Oil on canvas, 1925

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, present, and future yet remaine

Dura-Europos predates synagogues in Israel and is the earliest known example of a Jewish house of worship (as opposed to a sacrificial temple) | Photo retouching: Marsyas

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 19

Though faded and unavailable to the public in their hidden corner of Damascus’ National Syrian Museum, the murals of Dura-Europos are the most detailed surviving examples of ancient Jewish art. Aaron the high priest and the Tabernacle, from the synagogue walls

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 were the Jews who gathered ther

Why did Jews forsake the Temple Mount in favor of the Western Wall? Praying by the wall, 1894 | Photo: Felix Bonfil

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 to connect with their nati

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 of Canaan ended around th