More in ‘Spain’

Today in Tablet Magazine, Senior Writer Allison Hoffman introduces Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss, a German documentary about director Veit Harlin and Jew Süss, the grotesquely anti-Semitic movie Joseph Goebbels commissioned from him. According to Mideast columnist Lee Smith, recent history demonstrates, contra a new book, that engaging with terrorists does not usually ...

When I was 16, my father taught me a popular Egyptian saying, which would spark my desire to travel on my own. “In the country where they don’t know you,” he’d said through his laugh, “hike up your galibeya and run wild through it.” It’s not exactly the advice a Muslim father would typically give ...

• The Israeli Air Force revealed new pilotless drones (the size of Boeing 737s) that have a long enough range to be operational against, say, Iran. [NYT]
• The French and Spanish foreign ministers are the most prominent supporters of an initiative that would see the European Union recognize a Palestinian state within 18 months. Israel ...

Great medieval Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi is golden this month, and not just because he lived during the Golden Age of Spain. First, Nextbook Press—Tablet Magazine’s close relation—published an acclaimed biography of Halevi by Hillel Halkin, who argues that his subject was, in addition to the poet laureate of the Jewish people, in many ways ...

Today in Tablet Magazine, Mideast columnist Lee Smith follows up last week’s profile of two prominent American lobbyists for Iran with another of Trita Parsi, an activist allied with the reformist wing of the Iranian regime who has tried to create the Iranian-American equivalent of AIPAC. ARTNews executive editor Robin Cembalest prepares us for a ...

In the 1990s a guide hired by the Spanish tourist office took me to the last standing synagogue in the Spanish city of Segovia, which is now the Church of Corpus Christi, the home to an order of cloistered Franciscan nuns. Although the main gallery had been heavily restored after a fire in 1899, the ...

The Emails of Zion is a collection of messages from Jewish parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and others who are eager—often way too eager—to inform their children about issues of pressing concern to the Jewish community. Some of these emails may sound crazy, paranoid, ethnocentric, and/or racist, while others are disturbingly sane. These are the voices ...

Yehuda Halevi was, some say, the greatest Hebrew-language poet who ever lived. Also a physician and philosopher, he had the good fortune of living in a time and place—Andalusia, in southern Spain, in the 11th and 12th centuries—where the ability to write verse well was highly valued, and where there existed a culture of lively, ...

• The Spanish foreign minister announced his country will press for Palestinian statehood when it takes over the E.U. presidency on January 1st. [JTA]
• A Chabad-sponsored menorah at an entrance to Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park has prompted a heated discussion on the legality of religious displays on city property. [NYT]
• Newsweek’s ace investigative reporter Michael ...

The oldest surviving complete Torah scroll from pre-Inquisition Spain was sold at Sotheby’s yesterday to an unnamed American private collector for $398,500—not quite the half-million bucks the auction house gave as the high estimate, but impressive nonetheless. The 700-year-old scroll was put up for sale by Rabbi Yitzchok Reisman, a Torah scribe and repairman on ...