Bearing public witness isn’t Jewish custom. We confess our collective sins corporately on the Day of Atonement. But an editorship at First Things is not a seat on a Wall Street trading floor, or a teaching gig at a conservatory of music; it is a position of public trust, and I owed the . . . . Continue Reading »
A culture must believe in its own enculturating responsibility and mission. This a post-Christian Europe cannot . . . . Continue Reading »
Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations by martin goodman knopf, 624 pages, $35 When I first saw the title of this book, I thought of Tertullian’s famous question: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? But Goodman did not have Tertullian in mind when he chose his title. He was . . . . Continue Reading »
On July 22, 2007, the New York Times ran an article by Harvard law professor Noah Feldman on the repercussions of his marrying outside his Jewish faith. The article, entitled “Orthodox Paradox,” details how Feldman, a Yeshiva day-school graduate, Rhodes scholar, and all-around Jewish wunderkind . . . . Continue Reading »
I cannot conceive an argument with John’s Jesus,” Jacob Neusner once wrote, “because eternal Israel in John is treated with unconcealed hatred.” The Gospel of Matthew, on the other hand, was written for a Jewish audience, and the Jesus it portrays is someone with whom Neusner could imagine a . . . . Continue Reading »
Jews and Power by ruth r. wisse schocken, 256 pages, $19.95 Ruth Wisse is a distinguished scholar: professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, author of the classic 1971 study The Schlemiel as a Modern Hero, and editor of several anthologies of Yiddish prose and poetry, much of . . . . Continue Reading »
Jesus in the Talmud by peter schäfer princeton university press, 232 pages, $24.95 Rabbinic literature is surprisingly silent on Christianity—but Jesus makes a cameo appearance in the Talmud, and it isn’t an endearing one. In scattered passages, the Talmud’s sages portray him as a child . . . . Continue Reading »
It has been forty years since my revered teacher Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, popularly known as “the Rav” by his followers in the modern wing of American Orthodoxy, presented his paper “Confrontation” to the Rabbinical Council of America. The paper was later published in the Council’s . . . . Continue Reading »
In his classic Holocaust text, The Sunflower, Simon Wiesenthal recounts the following experience. As a concentration camp prisoner, the monotony of his work detail is suddenly broken when he is brought to the bedside of a dying Nazi. The German delineates the gruesome details of his career, . . . . Continue Reading »
You don’t have to be Jewish to drink L’Chaim, to lift a glass “To Life.” Everyone in his right mind believes that life is good and that death is bad. But Jews have always had an unusually keen appreciation of life, and not only because it has been stolen from them so often and so cruelly. . . . . Continue Reading »
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