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To be in exile, with a religious or historical sense that one is exiled, is to have already a mission and purpose in life. One’s clear project then is to end the exile and to return to…
Over the past ten years, the American Jewish community has undergone a radical inner shift in mood, from buoyant optimism to deep anxiety about its future. […]
The present anxiety can be dated to the…
[…] Must we conclude that Israeli society is doomed to experience a Kulturkampf, and that the Zionist synthesis is marching ineluctably toward its undoing? Before answering that question, let us…
“Eretz Israel.” There is not one. We already grew up on one sublime Eretz Israel which is almost the be-all-and-end-all of everything. The place of the Jewish people. Its homeland, its right, its…
In the book of Ruth we read an extraordinary expression of love between two women, spoken by a daughter-in-law to her mother-in-law. The text has often been read as a reflection of Judaism’s position…
[…] the Madison Left experience, at least in the early and mid-1960s, was never simply an American experience. It was more jumbled, at least more composite—like America itself? In my own not untypical…
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…
There are contradictions and ambivalences in our celebrating Thanksgiving. We are recent Americans. It wasn’t the Mayflower that brought our people over here. We know too much about what the coming of…
Leehee woke me up at a quarter of four in the afternoon and asked me to come with them to Ein Hod for the Seder, despite everything.
“Don’t do this to me,” I said. “You know I’m not…
Our generation came to this country from lands where Jewish life had been lived within its own boundaries, and where our communal leaders had instilled in us a sense of responsibility to ensure that…