Новости за 14.08.2018

I was preparing to teach the 1947 novel Gentleman’s Agreement to my students at the University of Florida, where I hold a chair in American Jewish culture. In the midst of writing a book about that novel-turned-Academy-Award-winning film, I read Jill Kargman’s essay about her son’s experience with anti-Semitism.

Government prosecutors rested their case yesterday in the high-profile tax- and bank-fraud trial of former Trump presidential campaign chief Paul Manafort. To an outside observer, it may have looked like the prosecution’s argument rested on Manafort’s failure to file taxes for millions in income, or the misleading statements he made applying for bank loans. But this is only part of the story. Looming large in the background is Manafort’s work on behalf of pro-Kremlin Ukrainian political elites... Читать дальше...

A riddle for the ages: If no Jews are involved in the commission of a criminal act, can it still be called a Jewish crime? Here’s one better: what if no crime at all occurred; is the specter of Jewish culpability enough to make a guilty party appear in the absence of an actual transgression?

Why did Israel need to pass the nation-state law? It’s a question worth pondering now that the shrieking accusations of its loudest bad-faith critics have been dispelled. The new law doesn’t state anything that the country’s Declaration of Independence had not already made clear, and it does not deprive a single individual of a single right. But why, precisely, was it necessary?

Why did Israel need to pass the nation state law? It’s a question worth pondering now that the shrieking accusations of its loudest bad faith critics have been dispelled. The new law doesn’t state anything that the country’s Declaration of Independence had not already made clear, and it does not deprive a single individual of a single right. But why, precisely, was it necessary?

In June, 170 people, ranging in age from infants to grandparents, assembled on a 220-acre patch of private land 10 miles northwest of Carlton, Washington, population 345. Saskatoon Circle, a weeklong “primitive and traditional living-skills gathering,” is the brainchild of Katie Russell, who teaches children and adults how to track, hunt, and field-dress animals—as well as process their hides. Saskatoon is inclusive in its spiritual orientation, and primitivist in its philosophy: The annual gathering... Читать дальше...

One of the features distinguishing Rav Kook’s corpus from that of most every other major Jewish thinker is his recourse to the genre of the spiritual diary. Rav Kook wrote, of course, in a variety of traditional genres: textual commentary, sermonics, responsa, poetry, essays, moralizing tracts, in some ways never entirely finding himself in any of them. In some of his early works, the sermon collection titled Midbar Shur and his commentary to Talmudic Aggadah, ’Eyn Ayah, his prolixity and the... Читать дальше...