More in ‘Maimonides’

The Hebrew Republic, Eric Nelson’s short but deeply learned and thought-provoking new book, sets out to resolve what looks like a strange historical paradox. Any standard textbook will tell you that 17th-century England was the birthplace of modern, liberal, secular ways of thinking about politics and government. At a time when England was convulsed by ...

Some historical personalities lived so long and ranged so widely that they pose unusual challenges to biographers. Take Moses Montefiore, who lived from 1784 to 1885 and was among the most prominent men, let alone Jews, of his era. An Italian-born British banker, he made a fortune working with the Rothschilds, was knighted by Queen ...

• Mark Siegel, who wrote a New York Post op-ed explaining that he’s against health care reform because he follows “the Oath of Maimonides,” apparently didn’t realize that the 12th century rabbi, philosopher, and physician had already weighed in on the topic. [NYP]
• In an article about the tendency of Cholov Yisroel (kosher milk certified ...

President Obama yesterday spoke to two conference calls of religious leaders—one organized by the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and featuring rabbis from all three major movements; the other an interfaith call including clergy and lay leaders—seeking their help in selling the need for health-care reform. With no end in sight to the nationwide ...

Poland summons up nightmare images for many Jews; the very word evokes the tragedies of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Warsaw Ghetto. The latter receives long overdue, and nearly exhaustive treatment in The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City (Yale, July), by two Warsaw-based historians, Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak. Given the extent and intensity of Jewish suffering on Polish soil in the mid-20th century, no wonder that many Jews associate the country withtsuris or that in Maus, Art Spiegelman represents Poles as pigs, the very trayfest of the trayf.

The idea that there is a Jewish genius for commentary—more, that in some way commentary, or criticism, or interpretation, represents the truly Jewish way of engaging with literature, and even with the world—has appealed to many modern Jewish writers. And certainly there is no shortage of examples to support this idea. Georg Morris Cohen Brandes, the late-19th century Danish Jewish critic, was responsible for introducing the works of Nietzsche and Ibsen to Europe. Walter Benjamin, perhaps the most influential theorist of modernism, elevated criticism and commentary to a high art, even a metaphysical principle; to Benjamin, everything that exists, from language to the stars, is a kind of text waiting for its commentator.

“The history of philosophy, like history in general, aims at replacing a naïve relation with the past with one that is more thoughtful. It implies an intention to strangle legends.” A statement like that, coming in a book titled The Legend of the Middle Ages, amounts to a battle-cry; and there is no doubt that ...

In his work on the laws of teshuva, Maimonides outlined a three-step how-to guide for sinners soliciting forgiveness: abandon the sin, regret it, and accept a different future path. The twelfth-century philosopher’s target audience was individuals, not art museums. But since the latest exhibition at Chicago’s Spertus Museum opened just days before the High Holidays, ...

“Good news,” I said to my wife, Ilana, as the family sat down for Shabbat lunch. “Charles Murray says that you aren’t genetically stupider than me after all.”
She gave me one of those looks that says, “Take your Y chromosome and go to hell.”
“Who is Charles Murray and how does he know about our brains?” ...