At an early Passover seder last week at the City Winery, the poet Kevin Coval was, to the surprise of no one, assigned the Hagaddah reading of the Rebellious Child, an updating of the old-school Wicked Son. It’s been Coval’s nature to question all forms of established dogma, going back to his Hebrew school days…
As we mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I cannot help but reflect on a recent visit to Germany. Among the many lessons brought into stark focus, the trip illuminated the shameful failure of America to confront the ghosts of its past that continue to haunt the marginalized communities on Native American reservations scattered across the…
“A person is obligated to see himself as if he were leaving Egypt.” This instruction from the Talmud may not seem timely at the moment, as American Jews prepare to celebrate the conjoined holidays of Hanukkah and Thanksgiving rather than Passover. But thanks to the visceral, devastating film “12 Years a Slave,” we have a…
Sholem Alechem, Oklahoma! The name of an oil field several miles out of Ardmore, Okla., is a puzzle to local residents. Some believe that it must commemorate a Native American site. After all, Oklahoma was once Indian Territory, and it is still flush with Native American reservations and local names, from Shawnee Twin Lakes to…
Moses Levy of Florida: Jewish Utopian and Antebellum Reformer By C. S. Monaco Louisiana State University Press, 264 pages, $44.95. Moses Levy has waited more than100 years for his biographer. Levy died in 1854, virtually unnoticed. Pilgrimage, his utopian colony in Florida and the first Jewish communitarian settlement in the United States, was long gone…
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