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Reform Judaism is a phenomenon of man’s restless spirit. At its best it is a dynamic faith—and its very dynamism…
This appraisal of the west has remained Toynbee’s considered judgment. “In my eyes,” he states in the last volume of A Study of History, published in 1961, “the west is a…
[ . . . V]iewed from the broad historic perspective, it is not at all surprising that American Jewry has not yet produced those great cultural achievements for which we are all…
2. What was it that made for the peculiar position of the Jews in the Middle Ages and later, until emancipation came along? It was the ghetto, we are told and told again, which was at the root of…
Photographs shock us in so far as they show us something novel. Unfortunately, the ante keeps getting raised—partly through the very proliferation of such images of horror. One’s first encounter with…
What I am trying to suggest is that, different as the immediately present objects were in each case, Torah for the Rabbis, Nature for Wordsworth, there existed for the Rabbis and for Wordsworth a…
The Hebrew Zakhor—“Remember”—announces my elusive theme. Memory is always problematic, usually deceptive, sometimes treacherous. Proust knew this, and the English reader is deprived of the full force…
For a half-millennium the Jew, rejected by the world, had secluded himself within ghetto walls, unconcerned with what lay without. But the day came when the world…
Moses Mendelssohn’s German Philosophy did not survive him and his generation of the German Aufklärer. As the leading German philosopher, apart from some psychological and aesthetical theories, he…
Charity is only one part of maasim tovim, but it is a very important part. The most popular word for it in the shtetl is tsdokeh. This is one of the Hebrew words which have been incorporated into the…