Can ordinary citizens be trusted to govern themselves? This question is centuries old and the answer to it usually determines one’s position towards democracy.

I went down the rabbit hole on “Deportee,” after finding that it appeared on Dolly Parton’s 1980 album “9 to 5 and Odd Jobs.”

אין דעם פֿאַרלויף פֿון דער צײַט, האָב איך ביסלעכװײַז פֿאַרשטאַנען װאָס רבֿ האָלאַנדער האָט מיך אָפֿטמאָל באַטאָנט: מע דאַרף אַ נײַע ייִדישע קולטור אין אַמעריקע. 

The rebbe leading our discussion said that Chabad is the most intellectual Hasidus.

The summer after my sister’s bat mitzvah
I went away to camp for the first time,
nineteen,
pretending adulthood was a place I had already arrived.

At its heart, this game transforms a familiar Los Angeles frustration, trying to cross the city before Shabbos, into an opportunity for shared experience to anyone who drives here.

The priestly blessing articulated in this week’s parshah Naso is one of the most ancient and poignant passages in the Torah.

As opposed to “The Waste Land,” which deals with post-war disillusionment with a display of many modernist poetic elements, Reznikoff’s untitled poem strips away older poetic elements like metaphor and the pathetic (a storm in nature coincides with the stormy feelings of the poet).

Shestov’s writings challenged the authority of reason, logic, and “self-evident truths,” arguing that philosophy had too often ignored the uncertainty, suffering, and chaos at the center of human existence.

I thought I would begin with a group of Twentieth Century poets: Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen. Together they were referred to as the “Objectivist Poets.” None were particularly happy with the name, though they were united in a desire to bring the real world into poetry.

When the D Line extension opened last week, I couldn't but think back to Rabbi Hollander’s explorations of futurism in the newsletter, specifically the Italian futurism idea of collapsing simultaneous futures.

This book contains some of the most upsetting depictions of violence I have ever encountered–and I say this as a Jewish studies scholar who focuses specifically on literature and theology about pogroms and the Holocaust.

The most fascinating and groundbreaking addition of the Musar movement was the psychological analysis of the human mind, and the new methods offered to improve it, which were very much ahead of their time.

American society is founded on the sense that personal liberty is a primary value and I am a product of that society. Nevertheless, I have come to see that my personal liberty has always been limited by the nature of creation itself.

This “connectedness” is more than a relationship between two people in Jewish thought. Connectedness implies a social order of trust and support. This is what we would call a community, though in Jewish languages, a community is translated as “kahal.”

Tree represents a fascinating juncture in religious life of modernity, a moment when many left-wing and radicalized Americans were compelled to return to religious belief to escape what they saw as the oppressive confines of American society and domination by the United States government.

The German Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, viewed the Jewish nation as a nation without a seat, a nation without a physical space to dwell in. In fact, he viewed the Jewish people as a people who exist outside of history, who cannot be viewed in terms of time and space.

For me, it is unclear if the materialist understanding of the success and failure of Judaism expressed in The Chosen Few is actually helpful to us in our current moment.The actual values of Judaism go well beyond the simple fact that we prioritize educating our Youth.

If we are experiencing the flailing death of an empire that is bent on war and destruction as it peters out, Roth and Prine can teach us we’re not the first to know the feeling.

It appears that Jewish tradition made a clear choice to focus on personal and collective responsibility in this world, to atone, repent and correct as much as we can while we are alive, and not to delegate this responsibility to some force of evil which is beyond our control.