Yom Ha’atzmaut: How Jewish mobsters helped Israel gain its independence

How Dutch colonial officials used anti-Semitism to fuel anti-Chinese hate

How I came to an intellectual and spiritual connection with Swami Chidananda Saraswati

Rokhl’s Golden City: Secular Seders, camp epiphanies, and Yom HaShoah

Rokhl’s Golden City: yolks with blood spots, jokes with Hebrew subtitles, and ‘The Labor of Life’

How the anti-Jewish riot in Kishinev, then the capital of the Bessarabia Governorate in the Russian Empire, unfolded on April 19 and 20, 1903—an excerpt from a new history

Rokhl’s Golden City: ‘Canada First’ ideology in non-sappy immigrant-tale theater, an invisible feminist in Toronto, an Easter Egg revealed in ‘Futurama,’ and other dispatches from the orbiting Yiddish cosmos

A half-century after his groundbreaking ‘ethnopoetic’ anthology, Jerome Rothenberg’s shamanic journey into the sacred poetry of the past continues to lead him to the unknowns of poetry’s future

Rokhl’s Golden City: Eritrean detainees read Isaac Bashevis Singer, and the mother tongue meets the mother-land

The late, spaced-out Israeli artist would have been 84 this week

‘Seeing psychologically’ the philanthropic American collector couple who put Los Angeles on the art map

Should the law be invoked to confront the Holocaust?

Rokhl’s Golden City: Traveling in the land of living ghosts

Meme Wars: questioning our postmodern definitions of ‘equality’

The friendship of two young writers from Lodz who survived the Holocaust and achieved very different kinds of literary fame

Rokhl’s Golden City: Why reports of the death of Yiddish theater are greatly exaggerated

A glimpse into the late Israeli writer’s magical workshop, as his Hebrew editor illuminates the master’s attention to language and craft

Rokhl’s Golden City: Plans for the ‘day of immense goyish significance,’ and other klezmatic holiday delights

On the 20th anniversary of her death: How the influential Jewish apostate to Christianity and self-described ‘Hebrew-Christian’ Paul Philip Levertoff influenced the art and activism of his daughter

How the modern academic discipline of ‘Jewish Studies’ was invented in Renaissance England by the the greatest Christian Hebraist of the age

Golden City: Support #derkegnshtel and don’t be a seks farbrekher

Rokhl’s Golden City: Why Yiddish culture, alive and well, needs small but reliable financial support, not saving

For Zoketsu Norman Fischer—retired abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, experimental poet, and founder of an influential Jewish meditation group—the question is the answer

Rokhl’s Golden City: Yiddish vampires, Jewish Magic, Frankenstein, and ‘all those other impotent gods’

Robert Warshow, born 100 years ago and dead at 37, saw through Stalinist communism’s false American promises

Marvin Kalb remembers meeting the Cold War Soviet leader and his general, in ‘The Year I Was Peter the Great,’ a memoir of Moscow, 1956

Rokhl’s Golden City: Jewish Bolsheviks, Yiddish songs, ‘Comrade Stalin,’ and the year that changed the world

Boro Park Hasidim chronicle their past, present, and future in luxuriously printed volumes part yearbook, part history, part social pages, part prayer book

The life and high times of a Queens kid who found his way to Bob Dylan, Abbie Hoffman, Howard Stern, and Mike Tyson

An ancient, tiny book cataloging the components of the cosmos: was it magic, Kabbalah, a philosophical treatise, or something else?