Raphael Magarik
By Raphael Magarik
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Culture In praise of the yeshiva — and yet something crucial is missing
I went to yeshiva for the reason I imagine many men do: because I didn’t want to work. The summer after graduating college, I interned (unpaid) at a newspaper; toward the end, it was intimated that a job working for a columnist might be available. Having spent numerous afternoons listening to this person shout at…
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Culture When Native Americans were the lost tribes of Israel
Old Canaan in a New World By Elizabeth Fenton NYU Press, 272 pages, $35 When I lived in West Jerusalem, I regularly walked past a large poster which featured a Native American man. He was wearing traditional clothing and a feathered war bonnet, and the caption said, “Ask me about land for peace.” Nothing could…
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Culture Leonard Cohen’s Last Words Summon The Spirit Of The Poet
Like an urn is full of ash, a posthumous album can often be a light, insubstantial remembrance. The survivors who release it into the wind of public opinion can count themselves lucky if the contents do not rebound onto them embarrassingly. The best case scenario is usually a brief, respectful silence and then insignificance. Things…
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Culture Why Everything You Think You Know About Christian Zionism Is Wrong
'Christian Zionists do not secretly want to convert Jews; in fact many argue vociferously against missionizing'
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Opinion Rashida Tlaib’s Comments Weren’t Anti-Semitic – They Were Philosemitic
Yesterday, Representative Rashida Tlaib was smeared as an anti-Semite by Donald Trump and company. The accusation is false, but that’s not news. Republicans have been using the anti-Semitism charge cynically for some time. What is new, bitterly ironic, and quite sad, is that not only did Tlaib say nothing at all anti-Semitic, but what she…
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Opinion Michael Oren’s Trainwreck Interview Shows Israelis No Longer Care What We Think
On Saturday, Isaac Chotiner at the New Yorker tried to interview Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the United States. He failed. After a series of tense arguments, Oren hung up, claiming that Chotiner was “not interested in anything I have to say” and asking him to “withdraw” the interview. I am not surprised that…
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Culture Robert Alter And The Art Of Biblical Disappointment
The Art of Bible Translation By Robert Alter Princeton University Press, 152 pages, $24.95 Students disappoint their teachers constantly, but we enjoy doing so only rarely. Only once have I pleasurably frustrated Robert Alter’s hopes. I was sitting in his office, where I had come to discuss my paper for a graduate seminar on Exodus….
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Culture A Thrilling Israeli Spy Story, But Is It Accurate? Or Moral?
Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel By Matti Friedman Algonquin Books, 272 pages, $26.95 It is entertaining to learn that in Beirut in 1947, Jewish intelligence agents detonated a mine attached to the Aviso Grille, which was once Hitler’s personal yacht. In his new history, “Spies of No Country: Secret…
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Opinion I’m a rabbi arrested for protesting ICE in Minneapolis. The Book of Exodus shows us how this ends
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Fast Forward After Minneapolis shooting, local Jewish service channels a city’s grief — and resolve
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