Development Site - Changes here will not affect the live (production) site.
 

History & Ideas

A major tenet of rabbinic Judaism is that the Bible is not to be taken literally. But of course that’s not the whole story.

Sept. 17 2022 12:05AM

Jews were expected to transform their shtetl values, religious traditions, and bourgeois attitudes into muscular exemplars of humanity’s ideal, the New Soviet Man.

Sept. 12 2022 12:01AM

The word, like a small number of other Egyptian loanwords in the Bible, testifies to a period in which the early Israelite nation, or a part of it, was in intimate contact with Egyptian life.

Sept. 7 2022 12:01AM

This week, in Basel, the World Zionist Organization convened to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the First Zionist Congress. What was the original meeting like?

Sept. 2 2022 12:01AM

Mahmoud Abbas says that the Israelis committed “50 Holocausts” against the Palestinians. Why does he believe that, and what does the rest of the Arab world think about the Shoah?

Aug. 26 2022 12:01AM

The late historian’s memoir, an unstinting portrait of the unhappy collision of tradition and modernity in Lebanon in the years following World War II, is one of the best of our time.

Aug. 22 2022 12:01AM

The Israeli writer joined us last week to talk about growing up in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and the movie made about him and his father.

Aug. 16 2022 12:01AM

In a rebroadcast, the Israeli intellectual talks about his best-selling book on the revolutionary political ideas in the last speech of Moses.

Tikvah Podcast at Mosaic and Micah Goodman
Aug. 5 2022 12:01AM

One of the greatest Jewish historians on the clash of civilizations that played out within the psyches of young Odessan Jews.

Brian Horowitz, Simon Dubnov and Conor Daly
July 27 2022 12:01AM

The deultimization of the Hebrew language proceeds apace.

July 20 2022 12:01AM

A new history of the American right seeks from the first page to alert the reader to what it is not about: the 40th president. But in the end conservatives can’t escape Reagan—nor should they.

July 18 2022 12:01AM

The British writer joins us to think about the ideological battle over the Western tradition and the role Israel plays in that fight.

June 30 2022 12:33AM

An impressive new book explores how a community rooted in faith and law has grappled with the preeminent classical rationalist.

Alexander Orwin
June 29 2022 12:01AM

Jewish history has always known periods in which double naming existed, always in places in which Jews were relatively well-integrated in the non-Jewish society around them.

June 22 2022 12:01AM