Yoel Matveev
By Yoel Matveev
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Forverts in English The Jewish Designers of North Korea’s Hydrogen Bomb
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The whole world was recently unnerved to learn that North Korea successfully tested a hydrogen bomb on September 3rd, 2017. According to an analysis of the seismic activity measured from the blast, North Korea’s nuclear scientists seem to be familiar with the Teller-Ulam design for thermonuclear weapons….
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Forverts in English Acclaimed Yiddish Folksinger Arkady Gendler Dies at Age 95
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The legendary Yiddish folksinger, folklorist and teacher, Arkady Gendler, died at the venerable age of 95 at his home in the Ukrainian city of Zaporozhe on May 22nd. Gendler, a constant ebullient presence at klezmer music festivals around the world, played an important role in the modern…
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The Schmooze The Tragic Lives and Loves of Joyce’s Russian Translators
June 16 is Bloomsday, the day when Leopold Bloom, the Jewish-descended protagonist of James Joyce’s novel “Ulysses,” took his quasi-Homeric one-day odyssey through Dublin. It’s the day when Dubliners and Joyce’s fans throughout the world celebrate the legacy of the great Irish novelist, whose protagonist transcends all cultural and temporal borders while remaining both Irish…
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Culture The Rebbe of Sinn Féin
Last December, 300 Israeli rabbis, many of them employees of the state, signed a declaration forbidding Jews to sell or rent property to non-Jews. For some of them, the move was inspired by the philosophy of Isaac Halevi Herzog (1888–1959), one of the main modern proponents of a “halachic state” run according to the tenets…
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Culture Anarchic Revolution and Traditional Judaism
Gustav Landauer was born to a Jewish family in 1870, in Karlsruhe, Germany. As did most radicals, he abandoned religion in his youth, however, at the beginning of the 20th century he got interested in pantheistic, neoplatonic and kabbalah-inspired varieties of Christian mysticism. A few years later, he became friends with Martin Buber, and his…
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The Schmooze Cobbling Together Spirituality and Anarchism
A longer version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. The son of a Jewish shoe store owner, Gustav Landauer became famous and was killed as a Jewish-German anarchist, having abandoned religion in his youth. Born in 1870, in Karlsruhe, Germany, Landauer’s interests were political and literary, not religious. By the early 20th century, however,…
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Forverts in English A Yiddish word I never expected to see on a license plate
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Fast Forward Orthodox students seeking answers after American Airlines removes them from flight without explanation
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Opinion The campus protests are no longer about Israel. They’re about America.
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Opinion In our name: A message from Jewish students at Columbia University
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Opinion I was expelled from Columbia for my activism in ’68. Here’s what student activists need to focus on next
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Fast Forward EXCLUSIVE: NYC mayor’s top Jewish adviser to depart City Hall
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Yiddish קען אַ קאַוואַליר זײַן צו גוט?Can a suitor be too perfect?
ער איז געווען שיין, גוטהאַרציק און געהאַט אַ הויז אַ פּאַלאַץ. פֿאַר וואָס זשע האָב איך זיך געקווענקלט?
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Culture He’s named after his grandfather Alfred Dreyfus (not that one)