Raphael Magarik
By Raphael Magarik
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Opinion Even Lefties Should Support David the Nahlawi
Israeli soldiers support a comrade punished for pointing a gun at a Palestinian teenager. / Facebook We should all be with David the Nahlawi. Yes, I am talking about the 19-year-old Israeli soldier who pointed a gun and cursed at Palestinian youths in Hebron. Yes, I know that the brass knuckles one of his antagonists…
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Culture Putting Persian Back in the Talmud
● The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in Its Sasanian Context By Shai Secunda University of Pennsylvania Press, 272 pages, $55 Academic study of the Talmud once provoked anger. In “The Promise,” Chaim Potok’s 1969 sequel to “The Chosen,” Orthodox rabbinical student Reuven Malter wants to emend manuscripts and track the text’s historical development. His…
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Opinion Do Jewish Voices Count More on Israel and Iran?
Sanctions bill sponsor Sen. Robert Menendez addresses AIPAC annual policy conference, Washington Convention Center, March 5, 2013. / Getty Images In American politics, do Jewish voices count more on Israel than others? Should they? And who’s counting? UCLA professor Mark Kleiman, for one, who called on his Washington Monthly blog for readers to lobby their…
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Culture In Joshua Safran’s Memoir, Jack Kerouac Meets Edgar Allan Poe
Free Spirit: Growing Up On the Road and Off the Grid By Joshua Safran Hyperion, 288 pages, $24.99 Among the American contributions to world literature, perhaps least appreciated is the genre of automotive horror. To be sure, we are acknowledged to have invented the road trip, which was prophesied by Huck Finn and Lewis and…
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Culture David Nirenberg Traces The Long, Bewildering History of Anti-Semitism
● Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition By David Nirenberg W.W. Norton & Company, 624 pages, $35 Anti-Semitism’s eternal recurrence is so puzzling that it can invite mystification. Even the secularist Yiddish poet Yitzchak Katznelson, grappling with the Nazi extermination of European Jewry, resorted to religious myth. In his “Song of the Murdered Jewish People” (completed shortly…
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Culture How the Vilna Gaon Became More Modern Than Moses Mendelssohn
●THE GENIUS; ELIJAH OF VILNA AND THE MAKING OF MODERN JUDAISM By Eliyahu Stern Yale University Press, $45, 336 pages Would you confuse Moses Mendelssohn and the Vilna Gaon, sometimes called the fathers, respectively, of Reform and Orthodox Judaism? Certainly not if you had seen their pictures. It’s hard to mistake Mendelssohn, with his clean-shaven…
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Culture Self-Hatred as Self-Help
On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred By Paul Reitter Princeton University Press, 176 pages, $26.95 What do we talk about when we talk about Jewish self-hatred? That’s the question Paul Reitter tackles in his new book, “On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred.” After tracing the first appearances of the term “Jewish self-hatred” in interwar Germany,…
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Life Q&A: Shira Hadasha’s Rahel Berkovits
Rahel Berkovits is an Israeli feminist, a teacher of Jewish texts, and a founder of Shira Hadasha, which bills itself as an “Orthodox Feminist Congregation in Jerusalem.” Her recent book, “A Daughter’s Recitation of Mourner’s Kaddish,” delves into classical sources, and argues that under Jewish law women are permitted to recite Mourner’s Kaddish. She spoke…
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