Miriam Shaviv
By Miriam Shaviv
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Culture Thoroughly Modern Marranos?
The Other Within: The Marranos: Split Identity and Emerging Modernity By Yirmiyahu Yovel Princeton University Press, 488 pages, $24.95. Diego Arias was born a Jew in 15th-century Spain, but his parents converted him to Catholicism following a wave of anti-Jewish persecution. Later in life, as royal chief financier of Castile, and one of the most…
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Culture Disraeli, Please Come Home
Benjamin Disraeli By Adam Kirsch Schocken/Nextbook, 288 pages, $21. Queen Victoria once asked Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th-century British prime minister, about his “real” religion. “You were born a Jew and you forsook your great people,” she said. “Now you are a member of the Church of England, but no one believes that you are a…
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Culture Studying the Results of the ‘Year in Israel’
Flipping Out? Myth or Fact: The Impact of the ‘Year in Israel’ By Shalom Berger, Daniel Jacobson and Chaim Waxman Yashar Books, 235 pages, $24.95. Since the 1980s, it has become the norm in the Modern Orthodox community for high-school graduates to spend a year studying in yeshivas in Israel. More than 1,000 American 18-year-olds…
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Culture Israel’s ‘Golden Boy’: A New Biography Explores How It Is We Came To Forget Yigal Allon
Yigal Allon, Native Son: A Biography By Anita Shapira Translated by Evelyn Abel University of Pennsylvania Press, 392 pages, $49.95. At the end of the Israeli War of Independence, no military leader was better known than Yigal Allon. A former commander of the elite Palmach unit, Allon, a broad-shouldered sabra, coordinated the battles for the…
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Opinion Silence Won’t End British Boycotts
Over the past three months, the movement to promote a boycott of Israel in the United Kingdom has had some alarming successes. In April, the National Union of Journalists voted to boycott all Israeli goods. In May, the University and College Union decided to promote an academic boycott. And last week, Unison, the biggest trade…
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Culture Life After Death
Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life By Jon D. Levenson Yale University Press, 274 pages, $40. For many non-Orthodox Jews, the concept of the physical resurrection of the dead has always been difficult. Prayers mentioning the doctrine — including such central texts as the second paragraph of…
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Culture Rethinking the Divine
In 1982, noted Israeli thinker Yeshayahu Leibowitz wrote that “the question of women and Judaism is more crucial than all the political problems of the people and its state. Failure to deal with it seriously threatens the viability of the Judaism of Torah and Mitzvoth in the contemporary world.” Despite the passage of 20 years,…
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News Artscroll Readers of All Stripes Find Meaning in Translation
Just before 6 a.m. on each weekday, members of Toronto’s Beth Avraham Yosef synagogue make their way across a snowy parking lot to the first of the congregation’s three daily Talmud classes. About half of them are holding under their arms a volume of the Artscroll Talmud. According to the synagogue’s religious leader, Rabbi Baruch…
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