● Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi By Amy-Jill Levine HarperOne, 320 pages, $25.99 When we were children, many of us (especially those of us in yeshivot) were taught to abominate the Christian Scriptures; they were precursors to 2,000 years of Jew hatred. At the very least, it was suggested…
Mayim Bialik has a sense of humor. The actress shared a picture of her cat on Instagram today with the caption: “My sleepy baby, Esau. (that’s an ironic Biblical name. Google it.)” Once you recover from the sight of what is really a scary-looking hairless creature, the joke is pretty clever. Esau, in the Torah,…
Christian Bale as Moses in Ridley Scott’s ‘Exodus’ / Photo copyright 20th Century Fox Bible spin-offs are nearly as old as the Bible itself, but this year saw a couple of big-screen adaptations that were hard to rival in their ambitions, or their controversies. Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah,” starring Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly, provided a…
Lot And His Daughters by Joachim Antonisz Wtewael (c.1600) If you ever wonder why a movie got the rating it did, there’s a box at the bottom of every movie poster that explains not only what the rating is, but also its reason. So, if you object to violence but not sex, or drugs but…
When Anita Diamant’s novel “The Red Tent” hit bookstores in 1997, Jewish women couldn’t devour it fast enough. The book focuses on Jacob and Leah’s daughter Dinah, who only gets one sentence in the Bible. Famously, it tries to upend the narrative of her rape, giving her a voice and a sense of agency that…
What do you get when you combine Brody’s wife from “Homeland,” that guy from “Game of Thrones,” Minnie Driver in some kind of linen robe and the writers from the “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants”? Lifetime’s adaptation of “The Red Tent,”, a two part-miniseries set to air December 7 and 8. Anita Diamant’s best-selling novel…
(JTA) — President Obama did not mention Jews once in his Nov. 20 speech announcing immigration reforms, but he ended with a flourish that would be immediately recognizable to anyone who has sat through a Passover seder. “Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger –…
Hobby Lobby’s Steve Green hopes his planned $800 million Museum of the Bible in Washington and its priceless collection can satisfy both scholars and casual visitors. But with Hobby Lobby a household word after the craft store chain’s contentious victory in a Supreme Court ruling over contraception, scholars and analysts worry that despite its vast…
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