As I have done occasionally on the pages of this magazine (check out the select list of articles below), I continue to educate myself on the cultural origins of the…
Judaism
The Tragic Clash of the Semites
The forgotten history of Jews and Muslims needs to be recovered in order to challenge a multitude of dangerous false assumptions that exacerbate the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
La Belle Juive
As a keen museumgoer, I have spent countless hours looking at paintings of beautiful Jewish women. Yet until recently I had not realized that the motif of the beautiful Jewess is a recurrent and evolving trope in Western literature and the visual arts.
Choosing Which Language to Live In
“I feel closer to an Arab from Morocco than to a Jew from Brooklyn or Boston.” My mother is a Moroccan Jew, born and bred in Tangier, where she also spent…
Jesus Was Not Christian
Not long after I reviewed Reza Aslan’s work on Jesus, I came across Geza Vermes’s excellent study, Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea (2013), that shows how Jesus’ iconoclastic but…
The Past and Future of Israel
The moment I heard about Ari Shavit’s book, My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, I hastened to get a copy, then another one when I joyfully shared…