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Mendele the bookpeddler says: Whenever a Jew comes to a journey’s end, he feels as if his hips are breaking, his back aching, and his knees shaking from being crushed and squeezed…
How preposterous and ridiculous! I have been attacked all my life as a Jew and because I am a Jew, and could not forget nor deny that I am a Jew, even if I wanted to. I am just as proud as Spinoza was…
The sum of suffering is greater
Than the sum of happiness.
That’s what a philosopher said
Long ago, years and years.
The waves of suffering wash away
Happiness’s tiny isle.
The bridge of suffering…
This sculpture of Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) was created by Tassaert, a distinguished sculptor of the day. Mendelssohn sat for him, and copies of the bust were later made for Mendelssohn’s closest…
The Jews are probably the only people in the world to whom it has ever been proposed that their historic destiny is—to be nice. This singular concept has played such an important role in…
In a phrase of Hermann Cohen, Maimonides is the “classic of rationalism” in Judaism. This phrase appears to us to be correct in a stricter sense than Cohen may have intended: Maimonides’…
You hold me now completely in your hands
My heart beats like a frightened little bird’s
Against your palm. Take heed! You do not think
A person lives within the page you thumb.
To you this book is…
On the white garments of my great-grandfather
the cross of the middle ages flames anew.
My great-grandfather sits at the seder,
holding a staff from a wild almond tree
to rouse the forefathers.
Not…
It’s hard to be clever these nights,
And useless to be modern.
Useless to smile knowingly and observe with melancholy
The language bastardisms of history:
“The government of the Republic is delivered…
When our wild day is wiped like a tear
From cities and forest, from month and year,
Red Ridinghood walks on the road,
To pick a wild flower in the wood.
And following her is a duck and a cow,
Hobbl…