Arts and Culture

Holy longing, holy language: Yehoshua November’s "God’s Optimism"

By Rabbi Rachel Barenblat

A wordless niggun I know asks why a soul enters the world, and then answers “to know God.” Surely that is the answer these poems provide.

Arts and Culture

The New Jewish Literature

By Mark Shechner, Thane Rosenbaum and Victoria Aarons

We are witnessing a new era of Jewish writing in the United States, and as its readers we are particularly pleased to be in a position to watch it develop.

News and Politics

"We Are Not Like Them": Itamar Massacre Activates A Dangerous Israeli-Jewish Ethnocentrism

By Roi Ben-Yehuda

“Let us not forget who we are dealing with. During a new moon, or when a crow’s dropping hit a howling jackal… the wild beast…sets off to stalk its prey.” Who said this? Not Osama Bin Laden. Not Khadafi. It was Gilad Sharon, speaking about the Palestinian people.

Arts and Culture

The Metamorphosis: Jonathan Kis-Lev's Jerusalems

By Samuel Thrope

Kis-Lev’s images depict Jerusalems which have become mundane, detached from heaven, sundered from holiness. Only in such a Jerusalem could mosque, synagogue, and church equally and peaceably divide the horizon.

Faith and Practice

God of Contradiction: On Language and Liturgy

By Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg

The time has come to stop thinking about language and God, lest we become so tangled up in our metaphors that they become our experience of God entirely.

Arts and Culture

Rethinking Modern Hebrew Literature: A Review of Shachar M. Pinsker's Literary Passports

By Philip Hollander

Hebrew literature did not begin in Palestine. It began in Europe, as part of a distinctly modernist approach to 20th century European Jewish life.

Faith and Practice

(Re) Reading Radicalism: Reading Reviews of Arthur Green’s Radical Judaism

In Radical Judaism, Green has finally “come out” and made his case for a full-blown post-monotheistic Judaism. Radical Judaism is nothing less than a call to re-envision the Jewish God and, by extension, Jewish practice and belief.

Arts and Culture

Israeli Ghost Stories

By Angela Himsel

“I’m having a love affair,” our cousin Motti confides, “with ghosts.”

Arts and Culture

Merle Feld Finds Her Words

By Rabbi Rachel Barenblat

Liturgy and family, awe and anger, these mixed ingredients produce a book best savoured in small bites.