Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth By Reza Aslan Random House, 336 pages, $27 Is it possible to change the tenor of public debate on a subject with a piece of writing? Is it conceivable that the “general reader” still exists, that judgment-suspended individual who picks up a book because she or…
It has been dismissed as a tempest in a teapot, but the recent brouhaha over JC Penney’s now-infamous Hitler teakettle may be more significant than it initially appears. Click to enlarge/Kurt Hoffman illustration. Far from being an isolated incident, it is merely the latest in a long series of news stories in recent years about…
Gallery 395A is tucked away in a corner on the third floor of the Art Institute of Chicago’s modern wing. After passing works by Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti and Salvador Dalí, viewers enter Gallery 395, which features a glass wall overlooking Lake Michigan and is packed with Constantin Brâncusi, Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore sculptures….
A Florida university has come under fire over a professor’s controversial classroom assignment that asked his students to write “Jesus” on a sheet of paper and then to step on it. The incident earlier this month at the Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida, has prompted the school to issue an apology and led…
What’s purple, crawls without legs, and is of the Mosaic persuasion? I hope you give up, because if you’re still trying to guess, I shouldn’t be telling you that it’s a Wandering Jew. Where mine originally came from, I have no idea. I only know that it’s been in my garden for a long time,…
In my September 6 column about a Yiddish translation of the Qur’an, I observed that many of the singular effects created by translating the sacred scriptures of Islam, a religion closely linked to Judaism, into an intensely Jewish language like Yiddish would no doubt be found in a Yiddish translation of the Christian New Testament,…
In this podcast, Forward Managing Editor Dan Friedman talks with award-winning author Naomi Alderman. Her first novel, Disobedience, won her the Orange Award for New Writers and got her shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the Sami Rohr Prize. She is in the studio to discuss her new novel, The Liars’…
Time to catch up on some mail! Gary J. Frenkel takes issue with my statement in my August 17 column that the name Jesus in Hebrew is Yeshu (a shortened form of Yeshu’a, itself a shortened form of Yehoshua or Joshua). Mr. Frenkel writes: “My understanding is that Yeshu is, not a shortened version of…
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