The New York Intellectuals
We were living directly after the Holocaust of the European Jews. We might scorn our origins; we might crush America with discoveries of ardor; we might change our names. But we knew that but for an accident of geography we might also now be bars of soap. At least some of us could not help feeling that in our earlier claims to have shaken off all…
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The French Enlightenment and the Jews
The era of Western history that began with the French Revolution ended in Auschwitz. The emancipation of the Jews was reversed in the most horrendous way. For a short while after 1945 the reigning…
Notes on the New Translation of the Torah
It has not always been easy to break with the more than two-thousand-year-old manner of translating the Hebrew Bible, the word-for-word manner. Thus in Gen. 14.1–2 (cf. vv…
To Uncle Tom and Other Such Jews
The Jew can be an ally of the black liberation movement and he should be. But first he must find himself. He must realize that his own struggle for liberation is a continuing one, that he also has…
Toward a New Yiddish
[ . . . ] It seems to me we are ready to rethink ourselves in America now; to preserve ourselves by a new culture-making.
Now you will say that this is a vast and stupid contradiction following all I…
The Jew Who Wasn’t There
It is not unusual for committed Jewish women to be uneasy about their position as Jews. It was to cry down our doubts that rabbis developed their pre-packaged orations on the nobility of motherhood…
There We Sat Down: Talmudic Judaism in the Making
Like other “holy men,” the rabbi played political, religious, and cultural roles. Just as the Zoroastrian Magus was involved in the administration of the local community, in the maintenance of cultic…