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Meaning “anchored” or “chained” wife, an agunah is a woman who is unwillingly bound to a marriage. Because a Jewish marriage can be ended, religiously speaking, only by the death of either party or when a husband writes (and a woman accepts) a gett, a writ of divorce, women can become agunot (the plural) in a couple of different ways. In olden times, an agunah could be a woman whose husband did not return from battle or was lost at sea, but whose body was never found; in such a case, he was presumed to be alive, and the woman was not free to remarry. Today, such cases of wartime agunot are far rarer (though not unheard of). More typically, an agunah today is a woman who wants a divorce but whose husband won’t give her a gett, which occurs almost exclusively in the Orthodox community, where the gett is still considered crucial. Some men use gett refusal to blackmail women into favorable divorce settlements, even outright cash payments. Technically, that kind of coercion is forbidden by Jewish law, but Jewish religious courts (see beit din) are often ineffective at enforcing that prohibition. The legal pickle in which the agunah can find herself has over the centuries led agunot to go to extreme lengths to force their husbands’ hands. In 2015, Rabbi Mendel Epstein of Brooklyn was convicted of conspiracy to commit kidnapping; he led a band of thugs for hire who used cattle prods and other torture methods to persuade recalcitrant husbands to liberate their wives. To really get the problem of the agunah, check out the 2014 Israeli film Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem.

Anti-Semitism is not a social prejudice against Jews; it’s a conspiracy theory. In fact, it’s the oldest and most powerful conspiracy theory in the West. You can be an anti-Semite without being particularly prejudiced against Jews in your personal interactions with them, and you can hold prejudiced views about Jews without being an anti-Semite. The person who finds Jews to be loud and vulgar and doesn’t want them in his country club is a bigot; if you asked him whether the reason he doesn’t like Jews is because they nefariously control the government and all the banks and are bent on world domination, he’d probably look at you as if you were insane. Conversely, there are people—including some Jews!—who happily watch Seinfeld and eat bagels and lox, but who also believe that a secret conspiracy of Likudniks dragged America into war in Iraq, or are responsible for the latest financial crisis, or the border crisis, which these Jews present in manipulative ways in the media, which (in their minds!) is secretly controlled by George Soros or Sheldon Adelson. To any normal person, whatever their prejudices, the core of anti-Semitic thinking is sheer insanity. To anti-Semites, it is revelatory - whatever their political affiliations.

Appetizing stores are the fish-and-dairy answer to the Jewish delicatessen. Instead of pastrami sandwiches stacked high, you come here for the cured salmon (kippered, smoked, and pickled), herring in multiple preparations, golden-skinned whitefish and chubs, salads of the egg-tuna-coleslaw ilk, cream cheese and other schmears, and the breads that were made to accompany them. These shops, such as the exemplary Russ & Daughters, Zabar’s, and Barney Greengrass in New York City, are magnets for demanding customers, who want the lox thinner and the bagels fresher.

On April 24, 1915, the police in Istanbul, displeased with the Armenian people’s decades-long quest for national sovereignty, arrested and deported 235 of the community’s leaders. Thus began the systematic genocide of as many as 1.5 million men, women, and children, who were marched to death, burnt, shot, beheaded, raped, and drowned by Turkish soldiers. This holocaust decimated as many as a third of all Armenians living at the time, and, more shamefully, is still brazenly denied by the Turkish government. Even more shamefully, many nations—including, as of 2019, the United States and Israel—still succumb to Turkey’s diplomatic pressure and do not recognize the Armenian Genocide. One person who did recognize it, however, was Adolf Hitler. “It’s a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me,” he said when explaining his intent to unleash death and destruction on millions of people. “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

One of the largest and most prominent Jewish publishers of traditional books in the United States, founded by two Orthodox rabbis in Brooklyn in 1976. Known especially for the ArtScroll siddur, a traditional Orthodox Jewish prayer book used by many congregations over the past forty years, the staff has produced the entire Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds in English translation, as well as translations of the medieval biblical commentaries of Rashi and Maimonides, plus other canonical texts of Jewish literature, including Susie Fishbein’s Kosher by Design cookbook series.

Jews with ancestors from Central and Eastern Europe. The word appears in the Hebrew Bible, but only in medieval times did it become the catchall phrase for a large and diverse group of people. Even though Jewish cultures across Europe varied—Lithuanian Jews and German Jews, for example, led very different lives—Ashkenazim, as they’re known, retained much in common, including a shared language, Yiddish, and colorless culinary staples like kugel and gefilte fish.

Assuming that Jewish life and culture is limited primarily to the experiences and customs of Ashkenazi Jews. To some extent, most American Jews—even those who are not themselves Ashkenazi—fall prey to Ashkenormativity, as Ashkenazi Jews have, since the late nineteenth century, constituted the great majority of American Jewry and been most prominent in Jewish religious and cultural life. But with increased immigration from the Middle East, Iran, and other regions, and with overdue attention to the experiences of historically overlooked groups, we really hope the Ashkenormative tendency is weakening.

A belief system unusually common among Jews. Not only are many great Jews atheists, but many great atheists are Jews. How many humans have come to their disbelief in God through Sigmund Freud? Through Karl Marx? Through Trotsky? Nobody has an entirely convincing answer for why even observant Jews show relatively high rates of atheism. It’s often suggested that because Jews value questioning, because our tradition has since Talmudic times honored argument and dissent, because we are allowed to be skeptical about most anything, we can be skeptical about God. Of course, among Orthodox Jews, belief in God is presumed. But even so, there’s more room for atheism than in other observant communities. Unlike, say, evangelical Christians, Jews aren’t expected to make ostentatious, public pronouncements of faith; a Jew who has lost faith but wants to retain his or her community can continue mouthing prayers, keeping the mitzvot, and acting like it’s all good. In general, because Judaism can function in so many ways—as a religion, a system of rituals, a calendar of holidays, a home-based practice, an ethnic identity, a tribe, a family—there’s ample room for an atheist Jew to still feel Jewish. By contrast, a Southern Baptist who has lost faith in God is adrift.

The most infamous Nazi concentration camp was actually a network of camps on the outskirts of the town of Oswiecim in Nazi-occupied Poland: Auschwitz I (the main camp), Auschwitz II (Birkenau, where the gas chambers were), Auschwitz III (Monowitz), and more than forty subcamps. Auschwitz was the German name for Oswiecim; in Yiddish the town was known as Oshpitzin. But today the word “Auschwitz” signifies pure atrocity, from the menacing “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign at the camp entrance to the horrific experiments performed on prisoners by Josef Mengele in Block 10. Upon arrival, prisoners were either sent directly to the gas chambers or registered for forced labor and tattooed with their identifying number (a practice that only occurred there). Also imprisoned were non-Jewish Poles, Roma, and Soviets, but of the 1.1 million people murdered at Auschwitz before the Soviet liberation in January 1945, almost 1 million were Jews. Today, the site is a museum and research facility, and it remains a popular tourist destination.

Considered the founder of the modern Hasidic movement, the Baal Shem Tov, whose name means “Master of the Good Name,” is sometimes referred to as the Besht. There is no shortage of stories and myths told about this holy rabbi and his followers, who emphasized prayer and a deep love of God over rote Talmud learning, and who inspired scores of disciples and Hasidic movements in his wake. Tales of the Baal Shem Tov range from the sweet to the profound to the strange and mystical.

Babel was a Russian Jewish writer best known for his collection of short stories Red Cavalry, adapted from Babel’s own recollections and diaries from his time as an army reporter. Many of the stories chronicled egregious acts of anti-Semitism by the army. Although at first Babel was able to elude the Soviet censors, his writing was eventually blacklisted. His other famous collection, Odessa Tales, explores life in a Jewish ghetto in Odessa, primarily through the character of a Jewish gangster named Benya Krik. Babel also wrote for the stage and the screen. In 1939, Babel was arrested on the false charge of espionage and forced to sign a confession. In early 1940, he was executed at the age of forty-five, a victim of Stalin’s purges.

A yeast cake stuffed with chocolate and topped with streusel. If you’re Jerry Seinfeld, you make an episode about it. If you’re Hungarian, you bake it flatter and without streusel and call it a kokosh. If you hate everything that’s good, you make a mistake and fill it with cinnamon instead.

A bar mitzvah is a “son of the commandment,” as the ancient phrase goes. In Ashkenazi Jewish tradition, one becomes a bar mitzvah at the age of thirteen or so, and from then on is counted as a full adult Jew, expected to fast on fast days, give tzedakah, read Torah publicly, and be responsible for one’s own actions. Historically, becoming a bar mitzvah marked the age when one’s parents were no longer responsible for one’s sins— before bar mitzvah, if you effed up, your dad took the fall. A bar mitzvah is also old enough to be counted in the minyan. Becoming a bar mitzvah was always considered something to celebrate, but about five hundred years ago, the celebrations really began to take off, and later, in the United States, they really took off. Today, “a bar mitzvah” often means a party, not a person—a party complete with food stations, hired dancers, chocolate fountains, a live band, and the ever-present party “theme,” which can be anything from board games to the Caribbean to golf. The over-the-top, materialistic bar mitzvah party has provoked a backlash, and today many rabbis and families work hard to “tone it down,” suggesting there is more “bar” going on than “mitzvah.” (As one gimlet-eyed mom put it when asked what the theme of her son’s bar mitzvah would be, “The theme will be Judaism.”) A common misconception is that one “gets bar mitzvah’d,” as if the rite is something done to a boy; rather, every Jew matures into adulthood, regardless of whether he or she has a ceremony. As one rabbi put it, bleakly but wisely, “Those kids who turned thirteen in Auschwitz? They’re still Jewish adults, even if they didn’t get the party.” While its history has ancient roots, the bat mitzvah is a more recent creation. The first recorded coming-of-age ceremonies for girls were held in nineteenth-century Europe. America’s first bat mitzvah, in 1922, came when the trailblazing Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionism (see Branches of Judaism, page 44), held one for his daughter, Judith, at his own New York City synagogue. The bat mitzvah first became popular in the more egalitarian branches of Judaism in America, particularly in the mid-twentieth century. But by century’s end, many Orthodox communities were also holding celebrations for twelve-year-old girls (the Mishnah says girls mature at twelve, a year before boys). Today most girls who become bat mitzvah get called to the Torah, with the exception of those in certain Orthodox communities. Recent decades have also seen the proliferation of late-life bat mitzvahs for women who didn’t have the chance to “come of age” officially.

Meant to be, fated. Yiddish noun and adjective. Used to imply that you and that special someone were always destined to be together.

The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel seeks to mobilize international pressure against the Jewish state. To accomplish this, BDS advocates boycotts of Israeli products, artists, universities, and political officials. The movement’s explicit aim is to compel Israel to both end its occupation of the Palestinian territories and to abrogate its Jewish character by admitting millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants into Israel itself, rather than into a separate Palestinian state. While the movement’s leaders oppose a two-state solution—instead supporting the replacement of the Jewish state with a non-Jewish one—its supporters are more diverse in their views, with some supporting boycotts of Israeli settlements but not of Israel proper. In the United States, the movement has had its greatest success winning supporters on college campuses, some of which have seen angry rifts between pro-BDS students and Zionist students.

The trio of three Jewish MCs known as the Beastie Boys were the reigning geniuses of their time and place, New York City in the 1980s. They were hilarious and brilliantly talented. They were obnoxious and at the same time unpretentious. They made fun of themselves. They were the bridge between old-school jams and artists like Eminem, Kanye West, and Earl Sweatshirt. Ad-Rock, who grew up in the Village, was the most inventive and talented rapper of the three Beasties and could have been Eminem, like producer Rick Rubin wanted, but never had any interest in going solo. Instead, he wrote love notes to his girlfriends in his songs. Adam Yauch grew up in Brooklyn Heights and became a deeply sincere Buddhist who gave global publicity to the Tibetan Buddhist cause. Mike D. was everyone’s favorite older brother, or younger brother, or weed dealer. They were the opposite of self-obsessed. They were humble, with giant inflatable onstage penises.

The sad truth is that his work is, at the moment, not in favor: young people who thrill to Jewish novelists like Nicole Krauss, Dara Horn, Gary Shteyngart, and David Bezmozgis may, if they have any interest in the old-timers, bone up on their Philip Roth or their Cynthia Ozick—but Bellow? He is curiously unread, despite being the first Jewish American novelist to really, really make it. His 1953 novel, The Adventures of Augie March, was compared to works by everyone from Cervantes to Joyce. Its famous opening lines announced Bellow’s literary ambition, immediately forging his voice as an immigrant—he’d been born in Canada to Russian Lithuanian Jews, who moved the family to Chicago when Bellow was nine—who would claim his place in the millennia-old Western tradition: I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles. He knocked, and the world opened: he won the National Book Award three times, a Pulitzer, and, in 1976, the Nobel Prize. The Nobel was like the capstone to the Jewish American literary efflorescence of the postwar years; it’s as if he won it for Roth, Ozick, Bernard Malamud, and the rest. Today, people who want a difficult, long, stream-of-conscious novel about ethnic alienation just go to Ulysses, while those who want to read about second-generation Americanness have a wealth of Jewish, Indian, Nigerian, and Irish writers, among others, to choose from. But do read Bellow—start with Her- zog (1964), which is funny, Bellow-vian in all the best ways, and won’t take you six months.

Born Gertrude (Tilly) Edelstein in Harlem, Berg is the powerhouse who created, wrote, and starred in The Goldbergs, which started as a radio show in 1929 and became a television show in 1949. The show depicted the struggles of a Jewish immigrant family adapting to life in America, and Berg played matriarch Molly Goldberg, with her trademark “Yoohoo,” to perfection.

Also known as Taglit-Birthright or simply Birthright. Since 1999, Birthright has provided diaspora Jews with free, ten-day (or so) tours of Israel, where they are encouraged to see the sights, fraternize with Israeli soldiers, and go home with a future spouse. Birthright isn’t exactly brainwashing—it’s more like a light brain cleanse. The quality of the cleanse varies widely, depending on what Birthright trip you take. Although the typical Birthright trip is run by a college Hillel, trips are also run by Chabad and numerous other organizations. There are themed trips for the enviro-conscious, for LGBT Jews, for those into “mindfulness,” and much more. In other words, Birthright is now a franchise, and any trip that meets certain basic criteria for safety and educational curricula can get the Birthright imprimatur and open the money spigot. Some studies show that the trip promotes attachment both to Jewishness and to Israel. This being a Jewish trip, there are critics—of its Zionist agenda, of its refusal to take participants to the West Bank, and, above all, of the extraordinary expenditure on what amounts to a free, oft-drunken trip for teens and young adults. Might these hundreds of millions of dollars be better spent on day schools or other educational endeavors, or even on Jewish podcasts? You tell us.

In 1144, in the English town of Norwich, a little boy named William was found dead in the woods, stabbed all over. A local monk soon wrote a hagiography of the boy, arguing that William had been kidnapped and crucified by the Jews, who, he said, reenacted the killing of Christ every Easter for their perverse pleasure. Similar accusations were soon made throughout England, usually resulting in the murder of Jews and, in 1290, in the expulsion of all Jews from England for nearly four hundred years. The blood libel soon spread to the rest of the continent, the claim often being that a Christian child had to be sacrificed so that his blood might be used to bake matzo on Passover. Blood libels remain a depressingly popular conspiracy theory, particularly in the Arab world.

This prolific writer for children, teens, and adults became a star with her 1970 coming-of-age story Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, though many of us are fond of Forever . . . (1975), a first-love story featuring a penis named Ralph. It was illicitly passed around every bunk in every Jewish summer camp in the 1970s and ’80s. Blume has sold more than eighty-five million books; her works have been translated into thirty-two languages. Her books are frequently banned by those who object to her depictions of teens’ sexuality and—possibly worse—atheistic tendencies. Blume owns a bookstore in Key West where actual human fans have seen her in the actual flesh

Ashkenazi Jews (and others with Eastern European ancestry) have a higher likelihood of inheriting BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations, which indicate heightened risk for certain cancers. Both women and men can have and transmit BRCA gene mutations: for women with the mutation, there is an increased risk of breast and ovarian cancers; for men, breast and prostate cancers. There is also an increased risk of pancreatic cancer for both men and women with BRCA gene mutations. But a BRCA gene mutation does not mean you will get cancer, just that you may need to take preventive measures—anything from doctor check-ins to regular self-exams to more extreme prophylactic measures, depending on your family history and personal risk. BRCA made headlines in 2013 when Angelina Jolie (not Jewish, alas) underwent a preventive double mastectomy after discovering she had a BRCA1 mutation.

The place where Jewish kids spend the summer and learn how to play ga-ga. Or something entirely different that Susan Sontag wrote about.

A mountain range in New York State, familiarly known as the Jewish Alps or the Borscht Belt. The Catskills were a popular Jewish summer resort area in the mid- twentieth century. Accommodations ranged from fancy hotels with swimming pools, multicourse dinners, and live entertainment to more rustic and family-oriented bungalow colonies and kuch-aleyns (literally “cook-alones,” bungalows or rooms with a kitchen). Musicians and other performers cut their teeth in front of the area’s notoriously difficult audiences, but the Catskills became truly famous for comedy: generations of comedians got their start, or honed their acts, there, from Henny Youngman to Sid Caesar, Rodney Dangerfield to Joan Rivers, Billy Crystal to Jerry Seinfeld. (The 1987 film Dirty Dancing is set in the old Catskills, if you want to get a feel for the scene.) These days the big hotels—the Concord, Grossinger’s, the Nevele, Kutsher’s—are gone, and the kuch-aleyns have mostly been torn down. But recent decades have seen a different kind of Jewish revival in the Catskills, as Hasidim have moved to some of the small towns full-time, escaping the higher cost of living in New York City, and many more come up to the remaining bungalow colonies over the summer; kosher bakeries and Yiddish billboards abound. It’s not the kind of scene that will nurture the next generation of comedians, but it ensures that you’ll be able to find good rugelach in the Catskills for years to come.

You know those people who stand on street corners in big cities and on college campuses and ask you if you’re Jewish? They’re Lubavitchers, members of the Hasidic sect known as Chabad. Following the teaching of their late Rebbe, Chabad is committed to inspiring all Jews to perform mitzvot, work they do out of “Chabad Houses”—they’re ubiquitous, from Boston to Bangkok—where you can always get a warm meal, learn how to put on tefillin or light Shabbat candles, and see an oil painting of the Rebbe on the wall. Chabad is probably the most visible form of Judaism, with its members out there on the front lines, cheerfully engaging anyone around them in anything Jewish.

Everyone’s favorite part of the Shabbat meal. When done right, this fluffy braided bread is just a little bit sweet and perfect for soaking up anything delicious on your plate. We traditionally tear it rather than cut it with a knife, and say a special blessing, Hamotzi, thanking God for this delicious gluten delivery system. The word challah originally referred to the portion of dough one was required to donate to the priests, or kohanim, when making large amounts of dough in Temple times. Now it just means the bread we love. Excellent for French toast, terrible when called “challah bread” by gentiles.

Andrew Goodman (b. 1943), Michael Schwerner (b. 1939), and James Chaney (b. 1943) had traveled to Mississippi with the Freedom Summer campaign in 1964 to register African Americans to vote. Goodman and Schwerner were Jewish, Chaney was black. After visiting a church that had been burned down by white supremacists, they were arrested outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, for speeding and held for a few hours. They were released, but as they drove out of town, they were abducted and executed. After an extensive search, their bodies were discovered, and it was revealed that members of the Ku Klux Klan, along with several law enforcement officials, were involved in their murders. Forty-one years later, a single man, Edgar Ray Killen, was convicted of the murders and sentenced to sixty years in prison; he died, incarcerated, in January 2018. The murders did much to galvanize public opinion and contributed to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A popular movie, Mississippi Burning (1988), was loosely based on the case, and Schwerner and Goodman’s sacrifice is often mentioned as an example of the considerable role Jews played in the civil rights movement.

Jewish penicillin. Chicken-infused water was singled out by Maimonides as the fix for what ails you, and unlike vitamin C, echinacea, Saint-John’s-wort, yoga, homeopathy, or positive thinking, it actually cures colds. Just ask your mother!

“Over the years,” write scholars Gaye Tuchman and Harry G. Levine in their 1992 scholarly paper “New York Jews and Chinese Food: The Social Construction of an Ethnic Pattern,” “New York Jews have found in Chinese restaurant food a flexible open symbol, a kind of blank screen on which they have projected a series of themes relating to their identity as modern Jews and as New Yorkers.” Put another way: American Jews have a thing for Chinese food. The question is why. Tuchman and Levine posit three answers. First, although Chinese food is not kosher, it appeared to many Jews—like the immigrants on the Lower East Side who lived minutes from New York’s Chinatown—to be, among other cuisines, relatively okay, or, as the expression goes, “safe treyf.” It used familiar ingredients, like chicken, beef, and noodles, and above all, it didn’t mix meat and dairy, because Chinese food contains no dairy. Second, “Jews construed Chinese restaurant food as cosmopolitan. For Jews in New York, eating in Chinese restaurants signified that one was not a provincial or parochial Eastern European Jew, not a ‘greenhorn’ or hick.” Finally, within a generation, Jews saw Chinese restaurant food as a Jewish thing: Jews did it because it was the kind of things Jews did. But there’s another reason: Chinese restaurants are open on Christmas Eve (and Christmas). It’s a truth not lost on Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan, who famously told Sen. Lindsey Graham, when he asked during her Senate confirmation hearing what she’d been doing one Christmas, “Like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.”

The foundational tenet of Jewish theology. At the height of the biblical drama, God speaks to the Israelites and tells them, “Unto Me you shall be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Standing at the foothills of the mountain, the baffled Israelites probably had a few questions: “Why us?” “What exactly is our job as God’s chosen people—what exactly were we chosen for?” “Are our children automatically chosen, too?” “Is this a good thing?” And “Is there a way to get unchosen?” These are logical questions, but God never says another word on the subject. Which is precisely the magic of chosenness: to have been chosen means spending millennia wondering what exactly it means to have been chosen, a divine brainteaser that, arguably, has inspired Jews through the centuries to ask really good questions and come up with really good arguments, even or especially in the absence of concrete answers (see lawyer).

Next to Scripture, it’s the second greatest literary gift Jews have given the world. It was the Jewish entrepreneurs Max Gaines and Harry L. Wildenberg who helped turn comic books into a truly massive commercial phenomenon in the early 1930s, but by the end of the decade, the potential for illustrated stories that could fit in a few strips seemed exhausted. Enter Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who, in 1938, gave us Action Comics #1. It was published by DC Comics’ Jewish boss, Harry Donenfeld, and featured a crypto-Jewish protagonist, an immigrant from a foreign and decimated culture who had to hide his true identity. His name was Superman. Thus began the golden age of comics, which was almost entirely influenced by Jews: Joe Simon and Jack Kirby created a hero who started out as a scrawny kid from Brooklyn and soon morphed into a supersoldier named Captain America, and shipped him overseas to fight the Nazis; Bob Kane went darker, giving us Batman, the orphaned and moody Caped Crusader; Will Eisner’s hero, the Spirit, was also a vigilante in a mask, albeit one who could tell (and take) a joke; Bill Finger went magical with a super ring that turned whoever possessed it into the Green Lantern; and Mort Weisinger dove underwater for inspiration, reemerging with Aquaman. That all these works were created and published by Jews is no coincidence: just like the movies, comic books were another unguarded, low-brow territory where smart and creative outsiders could gather to tell fantastic stories that helped them overcome their sense that American culture wasn’t exactly meant for folks like them. Harvey Kurtzman and Al Feldstein took this energy to its logical conclusion with MAD magazine, which more or less single-handedly shaped American humor for decades to come. And in the 1960s, as the counterculture was going mainstream, Stan Lee was there with Marvel Comics to deliver Ben Grimm, the Lower East Side Jewish thug who became the Thing, founding member of the Fantastic Four; Max Eisenhardt, the Auschwitz survivor who discovered his mutant powers and, as Magneto, unleashed them on humanity; the Silver Surfer, who, like Abraham, was commanded by an angry deity to leave his home, roam the earth, and sacrifice people; and a long string of others, from Spider-Man and the Hulk to Doctor Strange and Iron Man. Everywhere you look these days—from your PlayStation to the multiplex to Netflix—you see the work of a few ink-stained Jews who, half a century ago, dreamed big and bold.

There have always been converts to Judaism. If we follow Torah and say that Abraham was the first Jew, then his wife, Sarah, was the first convert. And the second would have been their daughter-in-law, Rebecca. These women converted just by marrying in. So did Moses’s wife Zipporah. But the most famous convert in Torah, and a hero to all Jews by choice, is Ruth, who after being widowed chose to stay with the Israelites, her late husband’s people. As we learn in the Book of Ruth, which is read on Shavuot, she said to her mother-in-law, Naomi, “Do not entreat me to forsake you, to turn back from after you. For whither you go, shall I go; where you lie down, shall I lie down; your people are my people; and your God is my God” (Ruth 1:16). In Talmudic times, the rabbis made conversion more complicated, requiring study, approval by a beit din, and immersion in a mikveh. There are many who believe that this heightened legalism was a wrong turn; indeed, most synagogues today, including Orthodox ones, have in their communities gentile spouses, children, or other fellow travelers who, while not technically Jewish, live as Jews and may be more knowledgeable, and more committed, than many halachic Jews. Should they need to be quizzed to be accepted, when Ruth was not? On the other hand, Judaism has always been a family—or nation, or tribe—as much as a religion, and it’s not surprising that Jews developed certain rituals of belonging. In any event, right now, there is a process, a hoop (made up of Stars of David) that you have to jump through, as many thousands willingly do every year.

The seven-and-a-half-year cycle of reading all 2,711 pages of the Talmud at the rate of one a day. Begun in August 1923 in Vienna by a rabbi named Meir Shapiro as a method for uniting the Jewish people through common daily study, Daf Yomi also ensures that Jews will have at least one new thing to argue about every day.

Kosher eateries that serve anything that’s not fleishig (meat)—including vegetarian fare and fish dishes, everything from borscht to kasha varnishkes to smoked whitefish—these institutions are best known for their dairy-based Ashkenazi options, like pierogies smothered in sour cream, or cheese blintzes smothered in sour cream, or potato pancakes smothered in (wait for it) sour cream. Some of these diners—like New York City’s Ratner’s (which closed in 2002) and B&H (still open)—became legends, key alternatives to the delicatessen for people looking for kosher restaurants that wouldn’t break the bank.

Jews, as you might’ve noticed, think a lot about death, which is why Judaism, in its infinite wisdom, prescribed several stages of mourning (known in Hebrew as avelut). First comes aninut, the initial shock of losing a loved one, which lasts until burial. (Jews try to arrange for the funeral and burial to take place within twenty-four hours of the death, barring extenuating circumstances.) During this stage of aninut, Jewish law forbids the mourner from fulfilling any positive commandments, such as praying or even participating in a minyan or reciting blessings on food. Then comes the funeral and burial, where eulogies are offered, psalms are recited, and the departed is remembered. Family members typically shovel a bit of dirt into the grave to begin the burial process. The mourner is then commanded to have a meal, typically one in which eggs are served, symbolizing the circle of life. Immediately following it is the shiva: Literally meaning “seven,” this is a period of seven days during which one mourns for an immediate relative by sitting on low stools (hence the phrase “sitting shiva”) and accepting visitors who come by to pay their condolences, often comforting the bereaved with unreasonable amounts of food. Any garment worn by mourners is ceremoniously ripped. After the shiva concludes, the final two stages are the sheloshim, which lasts for thirty days after the burial, and the twelve-month period during which some activities, like going to concerts, are avoided and the Mourner’s Kaddish is recited (until the start of the twelfth month). Once the year is up, the mourner commemorates with the yahrzeit, the anniversary of the person’s passing, when the headstone is unveiled. Jews may then remember the dearly departed every subsequent year on the yahrzeit by lighting candles and saying the Mourner’s Kaddish, and also with the family gathering to remember their loved one.

The Jewish delicatessen as we recognize it today is a product of immigration. The German immigrants (both Jewish and not) who arrived en masse in New York City starting in the mid-nineteenth century brought with them a deep devotion to sausages and salami. They opened pushcarts and small butcher shops to sell these meaty treats to their homesick neighbors. After an influx of Eastern European Jews (including Jews from Romania, who brought their technique for making pastrami) arrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these small establishments quickly grew and set down permanent roots in the Lower East Side and beyond. By the early 1930s, New York City’s five boroughs boasted a stunning 1,550 kosher delicatessens, according to Save the Deli by David Sax. Over the decades, the Jewish deli spread to other American cities. Delis also expanded their menus, becoming reputable places to find Ashkenazi classics like pillowy knishes, crispy potato latkes, gravy-drenched brisket, steaming bowls of matzo ball soup, and velvety chopped liver. And to wash it down, there was Dr. Brown’s root beer, cream soda, and the curiously vegetal Cel-Ray soda. Of course, any deli worth its salt also offered diners a gratis bowl of half-and full-sour pickles and coleslaw. The delicatessen became a fixture of New York City culinary lore and, for many Jews, a gastronomic second home. But in the second half of the twentieth century, thanks both to a desire on the part of American Jews to move beyond their roots and to a massively successful public–health campaign against cholesterol and saturated fat, the delicatessen began its decline. Many turned to mass-produced pickled meats, pasteurized sauerkraut, and other subpar ingredients. Their food simply wasn’t what it used to be. Stalwarts like Katz’s Deli and the 2nd Avenue Deli in New York, and Langer’s and Canter’s in Los Angeles, kept chugging along. But hundreds of others across the country—some iconic, some neighborhood establishments—shuttered. But in recent years, a new crop of diners have shown a resurgence of interest in the delicatessen, particularly artisanal delis that go back to their roots, curing meat in-house, baking sturdy rye breads, and fermenting vegetables the traditional way. Today, places like Mile End Deli in New York (with outposts in Nashville and Birmingham), Wexler’s Deli in Los Angeles, Wise Sons in San Francisco, Kenny & Zuke’s in Portland, Oregon, Rye Society in Denver, Zingerman’s Delicatessen in Ann Arbor, and Larder Delicatessen in Cleveland, among others, are breathing new life into this Jewish culinary establishment. With a little luck, and a lot of pastrami, the Jewish deli will be alive and kicking for generations to come.

Few bigots these days proudly parade themselves as such. Instead, they use code words and insinuations to spread their hatred while maintaining plausible deniability and social respectability. For example, rather than openly state that Jews are disloyal to their countries, manipulate the media, and exploit their fellow citizens, today’s fashionable anti-Semites instead say that “globalists” or “Zionists” or “George Soros” or “Rothschilds” do those things. As the terms themselves have nonracist meanings, the bigot can always feign ignorance. Meanwhile, the bigot’s intended audience knows exactly what is meant.

Canadian American rapper Aubrey Drake Graham, the son of a Canadian Ashkenazi Jewish mother and an African American father, is the most successful and influential Jewish musician to emerge in the twenty-first century. Drake, who attended a Toronto Jewish day school as a child, began his career as an actor on the Canadian teen drama Degrassi: The Next Generation. On his debut album, Thank Me Later (2010), and the string of smash releases that followed, Drake redefined pop. His music combines deft rhymes and big hooks, while mixing typical hip-hop braggadocio with, well, humble braggadocio: lyrics that express ambivalence and angst about fame, success, and a sex life Drake depicts as prodigious but emotionally alienating. It’s a style that critics have identified as “millennial,” but Drake can also be seen as classically Jewish: sharp-witted and dyspeptic, swinging wildly between self-regard and self-loathing, he is a textbook Jewish neurotic, a character out of Philip Roth or Woody Allen. Drake has often spoken about his Jewishness in interviews and has referenced it in his lyrics. The video for the 2012 single “HYFR (Hell Ya Fucking Right)” is a kind of Jewish burlesque: Drake reenacts his bar mitzvah, with scenes showing the rapper in a kippah and tallit on the synagogue bimah, dancing the hora, and eating a cake shaped like a Torah scroll.

Brilliant comedian and actress with an unrivaled nasal voice and bleating, sheeplike laugh. Drescher was born in Queens and first gained attention with the small but important scene in ’70s disco classic Saturday Night Fever in which she asks John Travolta’s Tony Manero if he is as good in bed as he was on the dance floor. Drescher became a household name with The Nanny, a throwback screwball sitcom that ran from 1993 to 1999. As Fran Fine, a down-on-her-luck but streetwise cosmetics saleswoman from Queens, she ends up looking after the three children of one very Waspy Manhattanite named Maxwell Sheffield. Lainie Kazan often dropped by as Fran’s Aunt Freida and Renée Taylor played her mother, Sylvia. There was also a Grandma Yetta. They all liked to talk about Barbra Streisand, and from time to time Fran taught the goyish kids some Yiddish. Drescher wrote the bestselling 1996 book Enter Whining and later, after surviving uterine cancer, began the Cancer Schmancer movement, promoting earlier screenings for female cancers.

North African country of ninety-nine million, with Cairo as its capital. The Jewish people and the Nilotic civilizations have been fatefully entangled with one another for the better part of three thousand years, and Mitzraim (Egypt) is one of Judaism’s various bywords for exile, slavery, spiritual disquiet, and every other national or existential ill. Egypt has been one of the Jewish people’s metaphysical bogeymen from the very beginning—as well as one of the Jews’ real-world, political bogeymen. Thutmose III went to war in Canaan in the fifteenth century BCE, while the book of Kings (and Chronicles) describes multiple pharaonic expeditions into Israelite lands. Passover, the entire book of Exodus, the Yom Kippur War, etc., notwithstanding, the Jewish relationship with Egypt isn’t entirely negative. Yes, the pharaoh Mernepteh apparently laid waste to the Israelites in the thirteenth century BCE—but the stele recording this feat, which sits in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum, is the oldest existing reference to “Israel” and crucial corroboration that such a people existed at this early point in history. “Egypt” and “Jewish” were never opposites. The Egyptian Jewish community produced a murderers’ row of notables, including the influential first-century Platonist philosopher Philo of Alexandria, along with Maimonides, who settled in Egypt for the last thirty years of his life and wrote his Guide for the Perplexed there. But in the twentieth century, Egypt stripped the country’s Jews of their citizenship after the founding of the State of Israel, and between 1948 and 1973, under Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat, Egypt made a number of unsuccessful attempts at conquering their northern neighbor. Yet even this story has a happy-ish ending: with the 1978 Camp David Accords, Egypt became the first Arab country to recognize Israel’s right to exist. The agreement, a turning point in the history of the Middle East, has held throughout decades of turmoil in the region, even if the countries have never been on especially warm terms. Visitors to Egypt can still see the ancient Ben Ezra synagogue, where the famed Cairo Geniza documents were uncovered, and there are a few shuls and rabbinic tombs scattered throughout the country. They won’t find many Jews, though: there aren’t more than one hundred left in a country that had a community of nearly eighty thousand in 1948.

Scientist who believed God does not play dice with the universe.

Everyone’s favorite Jewish grandfatherly figure, Elijah is the prophet from the biblical book of I Kings who, according to later tradition, appears at every Passover Seder and every bris. He also pops up throughout the Talmud, offering sage advice to the rabbis or bringing messages from heaven, and Hasidic stories even today often attribute miraculous events to his mysterious hand. While not a very warm and fuzzy guy in the Bible, he is also credited as the prophet who will announce the coming of the Messiah. Until then, we fill a glass of wine and open the door for him every year at the Passover Seder.

The Israeli commando operation that inspired a hundred action films. On June 27, 1976, an Air France plane took off from Tel Aviv for Paris, with a stopover in Athens. There, the flight was boarded by four terrorists: two Palestinians and two Germans. Soon after takeoff, the terrorists hijacked the plane, diverting it first to Libya and then to Entebbe, Uganda. They demanded five million dollars and the release of fifty- three Palestinian terrorists, and threatened to execute their hostages if their demands weren’t met. In the airport in Entebbe, the hostages were separated into two groups, the Jews and Israelis kept apart from the rest of the passengers. Determined to rescue the hostages rather than succumb to the terrorists’ demands, Israeli commandos took off for Entebbe on July 3, flying low to avoid being detected by radar. Landing in Uganda, they drove to the terminal in a convoy that included a black Mercedes meant to mimic the car used by the country’s despot, Idi Amin, and stormed the terminal. The operation was a success, even though three of the hostages were killed in the crossfire and one was later murdered in a Ugandan hospital, and the force’s commander, Lt. Colonel Yoni Netanyahu, the future prime minister’s brother, was shot and killed as well. The operation inspired armies around the world to emulate the IDF’s incomparable operational prowess, and was an enormous moral victory for the Jewish State.

The emerging field of study that examines alterations to genes (rather than changes to the genetic code itself) that change the way those genes function. Put plainly: Among other things, epigenetic research seeks to identify how traumatic stress may permanently alter the survivors’ physiology in ways that can be passed on to their descendants. Which, as you can imagine, is of deep interest to the Jewish community.

Ah, Jews, ever the utopians! Maybe because our Messiah is so slow to come, we like to pass the time dreaming up plans for a better world. How else could one small people have given the world Jesus, Marx, Herzl, and Freud? Or, for that matter, Ludovik Lazarus Zamenhof (1859–1917), the Polish Jewish ophthalmologist who in 1887 invented Esperanto, the most successful constructed, “universal” language ever. In a 1905 letter, Zamenhof, who lived in Warsaw, explained the roots of his plan for world peace through a new common language: “My Jewishness has been the main reason why, from earliest childhood, I have given my all for a single great idea, a single dream—the dream of the unity of humankind.” Like many young, emancipated Jews of his time, Zamenhof was torn between two vocations: a nationalist calling to build a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and a universalist calling to promote harmony among all peoples. By 1887, Zamenhof had decisively left Zionism behind for universalism. But the Nazis never forgot the Jewish roots, or spirit, of Esperanto; Hitler worried in Mein Kampf that Jews could use the language to plot world domination, and his ministry of education forbade its teaching. Today, alas, nobody has to forbid Esperanto: despite a recent revival of interest, there are at most a few thousand “native” speakers of the language. It was not the Nazis, through, who thwarted Esperanto. More likely, it was that the first half of the twentieth century had another, more compelling linguistic project, in a land more promising than Zamenhof ’s Poland. For more on that, see Ben-Yehuda, Eliezer. (And ne dankinde, as they say in Esperanto. You’re welcome.)

Boston-bred leader of the Nation of Islam, a black supremacist group that at its best promotes self-improvement and racial uplift for black people but at its worst—and its worst is always there—hates whites, Jews, and gays (and promulgates deeply bad ideas about female subservience). The bow-tied Farrakhan has dedicated decades to pursuing his anti-Semitic convictions, from arguing that it was God who put Jews in Hitler’s ovens to accusing Jews of orchestrating the attacks on 9/11. Despite his vile bigotry, he continues to be welcomed by allegedly liberal and progressive activists.

Food is central to many important days in the Jewish calendar—latkes on Hanukkah, apples and honey on Rosh Hashanah, hamantaschen on Purim—so it stands to reason that the absence of food can be just as significant. There are several days in the Jewish calendar designated for fasting. Fasting allows for reflection, atonement, or mourning. There are two “major” fast days—Yom Kippur and Tisha B’av—which last from sunset to sunset, and five “minor” fast days, which last from sunrise to sunset. (In Judaism, all fast days include a complete restriction on consuming any food or drink, even water.) And you don’t need a holiday to fast! Brides and grooms may fast on their wedding day, in acknowledgment of its holiness, and fast days can be convened in times of great crisis. Occasionally, people undertake a fast in response to tragedy, to atone for a personal wrongdoing, or as an extra measure of piety.

The father of psychoanalysis, and, by extension, all therapy. Every time we walk into the shrink’s office, every time Woody Allen’s characters refer to their analysts, we’re in a tradition established almost single-handedly by Freud. We talk Freud all the time: “the Oedipus Complex,” “repression,” dreams as reflections of desire, even the mere idea that belonging to a society with rules takes an enormous toll. He is one of the few humans who has changed the way the world thinks during his own lifetime.

With his band, the Texas Jewboys, this writer, crooner, and philosopher-king spent decades dispensing bits of wisdom like “They ain’t makin’ Jews like Jesus anymore / They ain’t makin’ carpenters that know what nails are for.”

In 1919, the United States adopted the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which beginning the following year made it illegal to manufacture, sell, or transport “intoxicating liquors...for beverage purposes.” As soon as the law passed, it seemed as if every American over the age of twelve had to have a drink. In response to this great American thirst, two hundred thousand unlicensed saloons soon sprang up across the United States. These bars and restaurants were euphemistically called “speakeasies” and “blind pigs.” Large bootleging organizations led by tough, ruthless lawbreaking sons of Irish, Italian, and, yes, Jewish immigrants arose to service them. Jewish mobsters were generally men who never finished high school and refused to work in a shop or factory. Yet they wanted the good life, the money and beautiful women and fancy cars and homes. During Prohibition, 50 percent of the nation’s leading bootlegers were Jews. And Jews and Jewish gangs bossed the rackets in some of America’s largest cities. But the man who masterminded New York’s underworld was no mere gangster. Best known as the man who allegedly “fixed” the 1919 World Series, Arnold Rothstein is recognized as a pioneer of organized crime in the United States, transforming American crime from petty larceny into big business. During the 1920s, Rothstein put together the largest gambling and bookmaking empire in the country, masterminded a million-dollar stolen-bond business, and controlled most of New York’s gangs, as well as the city’s traffic in narcotics, bootleging, and gambling. Rothstein moved freely in all circles, from politicians and statesmen to bankers and bums. In the 1920s, he had on his payroll many future machers ofthe underworld, including Italians such as Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Frank Costello, and young Jewish hoodlums, including Meyer Lansky, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, and Arthur Flegenheimer, better known as Dutch Schultz. Rothstein taught them that the dollar had one nationality and one religion: profit. After Prohibition, Siegel would turn Las Vegas into the nation’s gambling mecca, while Buchalter would muscle into New York’s labor unions. In 1944, Buchalter became the only national crime boss to be put to death in the electric chair. During Prohibition, Abner “Longy” Zwillman reigned as king of the rackets in Newark. Bootleging in Philadelphia was directed by Max “Boo Boo” Hoff, who headed a powerful gang of young Jewish toughs. In Minneapolis, there was Isidore “Kid Cann” Blumenfeld. In Cleveland, bootlegging and gambling were bossed by the “Cleveland Four”: Morris “Moe” Dalitz, Morris Kleinman, Sam Tucker, and Louis Rothkopf. Detroit’s all-Jewish purple gang was led by a transplanted New Yorker, Ray Bernstein. The gang, which at its peak had fifty members, dominated the city’s bootlegging and narcotics traffic throughout Prohibition. These men did everything. They dealt in bootleging, narcotics, extortion, prostitution, and contract killing. But they reigned for one generation only. They had no Jewish successors. Unlike the Italians, they kept their families out of the business. Jews moved to the suburbs, sent their children to universities, and became part of America’s economic, educational, and occupational elite. The era of the Jewish gangster became part of history, something for their grandchildren to read about.

Between roughly 230 CE and 500 CE, a second wave of rabbis, called Amoraim (“those who speak”), emerged to continue the work of explaining and annotating Jewish law. Whereas their predecessors, the Tannaim who composed the Mishnah, saw their work as delivering the oral tradition as it stood, the Amoraim, generally, saw theirs as expounding upon, expanding upon, and clarifying difficult questions. And whereas the Mishnah delivered rulings, the Gemara delivers dialectical questions riffing on the Mishnah; these questions are called sugyot, or sugya in the singular. These commentaries on the Mishnah make up the main body of the Talmud.

Fictional character developed by Frederick Kohner, based on his teenage daughter Kathy (b. 1941), for his 1957 novel subtitled The Little Girl with Big Ideas. The prototypical beach-bunny surfer-girl persona would feature in a handful of novels, a pair of novelizations, a series of films starring Sandra Dee, a sitcom with Sally Field, three TV movies, and one “Ambassador of Aloha” posting at Duke’s, a Hawaiian-themed restaurant in Malibu. All of which is to say that the embodiment of postwar American female surferdom is the daughter of a Czech Jew.

Anarchist, activist, socialist, writer, nurse, midwife, and ice cream store proprietress falsely credited with coining the phrase “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” Goldman immigrated to the United States from Lithuania in 1885 and soon became a hugely popular rabble-rouser. In 1892, she and her lifelong friend/fellow anarchist/sometimes lover Alexander Berkman plotted the murder of industrialist Henry Clay Frick. Frick had crushed a strike in the Pennsylvania steel plant he managed; the resulting violence led to multiple deaths and injuries. Police couldn’t tie Goldman to the crime, but she was later jailed for “inciting to riot” and for illegally distributing information about birth control. Upon her release from prison, Goldman was deported to Russia, where she soured on communism.

“Goyish” means of or relating to the goyim, the non-Jews. You know, like sipping gin on your sailboat with your pal Muffy. At its best, “goyish” is used humorously, one Jew to another, as a wink and a nod to something—or someone—fundamentally not us. Goyish doesn’t necessarily mean bad—it can just mean out of place in a Jewish setting. Christmas is goyish even though many Jews secretly love it. “Goyish” can sound derisive to non-Jews and thus must be wielded delicately. See Bruce, Lenny, one of the great scholars of goyishness versus Jewishness.

Jewish law. There’s a lot of it, millions of words, and there is no set of rules that can definitively say what is halacha and what’s not. Halacha includes the commandments in Torah, their elaborations in the Mishnah and the Talmud, and refinements by later sages down to the present day. You would typically only hear talk of “halacha” from an Orthodox Jew, but every time a Conservative Jew wonders what’s kosher and what’s not, she is asking a halachic question; when a Reform or secular Jew inquires about what makes a proper Jewish wedding, or how one converts, those, too, are questions of halacha. Halacha is everywhere.

A musical, a ten-dollar bill, and a founding father some people think might have been secretly Jewish. The theory is that his mother converted in 1745, which explains why he went to Hebrew school. We’ll take him.

Our sacred, ancient language. After millennia of being relegated solely to prayer books and shul services, it was resurrected by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who made sure we speak today more or less in the same exact way our ancestors did as early as the sixth century BCE. But while biblical Hebrew featured slightly fewer than nine thousand words, modern-day Hebrew boasts a vocabulary of sixty thousand, including botzer, the correct Hebrew term for “brunch” (it combines boker, or morning, and tzeharaim, or noon).

A Jew, often a semi-Semite, whose non-Jewish parent or ancestors are Hindu. Most Hinjews are American, and Hinjews are a growing proportion of American Jews, as Jews and Indian Americans have multiple opportunities to meet and fall in love: at prefrosh weekends on Ivy League campuses, in bar exam study groups, and at mixers for newly minted medical residents.

Military service is mandatory for all Israelis. Men serve slightly less than three years, women slightly more than two. Most men also serve on reserve duty a month or so each year until they turn forty, giving the IDF an easy-to-mobilize force of another half million or so soldiers, should the need arise—as, alas, it often does.

What Jews are in their ancestral homeland of Israel, from which they were expelled and to which they miraculously returned. No other indigenous people in the modern era have pulled off a similar feat.

We’ve come a long way since Bridget Loves Bernie, the 1972–1973 TV comedy that scandalized American Jewry by showing a happy, functional marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew. The show was a hit, but protests from rabbis and pressure on advertisers led to its cancellation after one season. Today, the majority of Reform Jews marry non-Jews, as do a growing percentage of all other Jews. Just ask Marc Mezvinsky (Chelsea Clinton); Mark Zuckerberg (Priscilla Chan); and Rachel Weisz (Daniel Craig). The Reform movement now permits its rabbis to officiate at interfaith weddings, and some Conservative rabbis have gone rogue to do the same. Some say that intermarriage hastens the end for the Jewish people, but some rabbis say that only welcoming interfaith couples will allow us to survive. Now, if we could just work on that low birth rate . . .

The commonly used moniker for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a 2015 agreement between Iran, the United States, the European Union, Russia, China, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Its goal was to slow Iran’s path to obtaining nuclear weapons, in return for easing international sanctions on the Islamic republic. It was one of the Obama administration’s most controversial foreign policy achievements, with most Republicans and even some Democrats opposing it. These opponents argued that it would do little to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions while rewarding it with one hundred billion dollars it could use to support military initiatives, particularly against Israel. In October 2017, President Donald Trump withdrew from the deal, which had been one of his major campaign promises.

The world’s only Jewish state, established in 1948 in the historic homeland of the Jewish people—where more than a million Arabs also lived—has absorbed waves of immigrants and refugees, from Holocaust survivors and their descendants to airlifted Ethiopian Jews to millions fleeing persecution from the former Soviet Union and the Middle East and North Africa. The country is currently home to just less than half of the world’s Jewish population, with some 6.5 million Jews living alongside approximately 1.7 million Arab citizens as of July 2017.

Statesman, politician, and founding father of Revisionist Zionism. He started out as a poet, and was so good that Maxim Gorky, fearing that the czarist police might ban one of Jabotinsky’s early books, bought all the copies and distributed them himself. But Theodor Herzl soon captured Jabotinsky’s imagination, and he decided to dedicate his life to the Zionist cause. When World War I broke out, Jabotinsky volunteered in the British Army, encouraging other Jews to do the same. If His Majesty’s government ended up liberating Palestine from the Ottomans, he argued, Jewish soldiers ought to take part. After the war ended, however, he grew deeply critical of the British Mandate for Palestine and advocated armed struggle against the Brits that would end with the establishment of the Jewish state. That was too much for most of Zionism’s leaders, who resented both Jabotinsky’s ideas and his cultlike status among his believers. David Ben-Gurion routinely compared him to Hitler. Finally, in 1923, Jabotinsky and his supporters resigned from the World Zionist Organization and soon after started their own movement, Revisionist Zionism, as well as a youth movement, Betar. He believed in traditional liberal values but thought that there could be no peace with the Arabs unless the Jews in Palestine forcefully demonstrated their indisputable military might. His followers, including Menachem Begin, were the founding fathers of the Israeli right, and Likud, the party they eventually established, remains heavily indebted to his ideas. He died of a sudden heart attack at age sixty while visiting a Betar summer camp in New York. His funeral, the press reported at the time, was one of the most heavily attended in the city’s history. His death, however, did little to lessen the fury of his political enemies: Ben-Gurion refused to allow Jabotinsky’s remains to be buried in Jerusalem; Jabotinsky was only so honored in 1964, when Ben-Gurion was temporarily out of power.

Somehow both an anti-Jewish and anti-woman slur, the JAP has its roots in the “Ghetto Girl” stereotype of the 1920s and ’30s, which was aimed at stylish Jewish working women, seen by the community as a symbol of assimilation, materialism, and women’s wildness. Popularized in its midcentury incarnation by Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar and Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, the JAP morphed into a spoiled woman interested only in a good marriage and a good blowout. Not incidentally, this stereotype was perpetuated mainly by Jewish men, who transformed the phrase from an intracommunity tsk-tsk-ing to an archetype familiar to the wider American community. In recent years, however, some Jewish women have embraced the term, finding empowerment in taking back what was once used against them.

Jewish mothers are awesome and got a raw deal in misogynist midcentury comedy.

An ethnic stereotype and, as such, a lucrative business idea for anti-Semites and plastic surgeons.

Rather inconveniently for some today, the only parts of Israel that the Bible explicitly mentions as the site of the ancient Jewish homeland. The contested heartland of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this narrow piece of land on the West Bank of the Jordan River was captured by Israel from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War and has been the locus of controversy ever since. Palestinians, many of whom have lived in the region for centuries under an array of rulers, claim the land as part of their future state. Israelis see the area as their historic home, where the ancient Kingdoms of Judah (Judea) and Southern Israel (Samaria) once stood. Israel’s security hawks view the territory as essential for the country’s strategic defense against border incursions, while its doves are willing to vacate much of the land in exchange for a peace agreement. Meanwhile, religious nationalist settlers drawn to the land for its theological significance have dotted some 2 percent of the region with Jewish settlements, hoping to thwart a two-state solution.

German-speaking, Bohemian Czech Jewish novelist and short-story writer, son of a merchant, grandson of a shochet, or kosher butcher. The bizarre, fantastical plots of works like The Metamorphosis (1915) and The Trial (written in 1914–1915, published posthumously) helped define our modern concepts of alienation and guilt. Kafka’s terrifying absurdities keep giving, informing the imaginations even of people who have never read the actual works: any educated Westerner knows that in The Metamorphosis, the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, awakens to discover that he has been transformed into a large insect. To this day, anything nightmarishly incomprehensible can be called “Kafkaesque”—and what other author, besides Orwell, had a really good adjective made from his name? Before he died of tuberculosis at the age of forty, Kafka left instructions that his unpublished writing be destroyed. Fortunately, his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, didn’t heed this request.

A Brooklyn-born Orthodox rabbi who gained notoriety in 1968, when he and his group, the Jewish Defense League, attacked Soviet targets stateside to protest the Kremlin’s abuse of Jewish refuseniks. A powerful writer and orator, he moved to Israel in 1971 and soon gained a loyal enough following that it inspired him to run for office. In 1984, he was finally elected to the Knesset and shocked many with his extreme views, which included advocating a transfer of Israel’s Arab population and outlawing marriages and sexual relations between Jews and gentiles. Responding to Kahane, the Knesset amended the nation’s Basic Law, barring a party determined to be racist from participating in elections, a stipulation that prevented Kahane from seeking reelection. In 1990, after speaking in a Manhattan hotel, he was assassinated by an Egyptian-born American named El Sayyid Nosair. Nosair’s mentor, Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman, rose to infamy three years later for his part in conspiring to blow up the World Trade Center.

Jewish dietary laws. You may remember the basics from Torah: To be kosher, animals must have cloven hooves and chew their own cud (sorry, piggie), fish must have fins and scales (adios, shrimp), and birds must not be scavengers or birds of prey. Kosher animals—cows, chickens, etc.—must be slaughtered by a shochet, a certified professional who cuts their jugular vein, their carotid artery, their esophagus, and their trachea in one smooth motion. There’s no mixing of milk and meat. The rest is commentary, the sort of commentary that continues to keep rabbis busy. There are different organizations certifying products as kosher, different classifications for products like dairy, bread, and wine, and different traditions among different communities. At last count, there are some two thousand kosher certification organizations.

A kibbutz is a communal farm or settlement in Israel. Different kibbutzim (the plural) specialize in different industries or products, and in the earlier, more utopian days of the State of Israel, it was very much the thing for a pioneering young American Jew to take some time abroad to work on a kibbutz: “After I didn’t get into the Peace Corps, I went and worked on a kibbutz for six months. We made olive oil.” The early kibbutzniks were usually socialist in their outlook; children were often raised communally, and on some kibbutzim all property was held in common. Today, the kibbutz is past its prime—there are fewer kibbutzim, and those that persist have often become partially privatized—but as of 2010, they still accounted for almost 10 percent of Israeli industrial output. For a terrific portrait of a kibbutz in contemporary Israeli society, check out Jessamyn Hope’s novel Safekeeping.

An American playwright best known for the Tony- and Pulitzer-winning Angels in America, which opened on Broadway in 1993. But he’s written much more that’s worth your time, including Homebody/Kabul, the musical Caroline, or Change, and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures—a title that may clue you in to the fact that Kushner is gay, left-wing politically, and verbose. He frequently deals with Jewish themes: he wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s movie Munich, adapted S. Ansky’s Yiddish play The Dybbuk, and coedited (with Alisa Solomon) the book Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. At times, Kushner sports an admirably full Jewfro.

For the first twenty-nine years of Israel’s existence, it was dominated by a single party: Labor, the mighty political machine built by David Ben-Gurion. During that period, elections were held not so much to determine who would be prime minister—that part was obvious—but rather to find out what other tiny parties got to fight over scraps from Labor’s big table. The party pursued its policies uninterrupted, balancing its socialist worldview with Israel’s national security needs. When Likud shocked the nation and won its first election in 1977, one Labor grandee famously said that if that’s the outcome, it’s time to vote out the people. Labor made a big comeback in the 1990s, led by Yitzhak Rabin and cheered on for its role in engineering the Oslo Accords. But once Rabin was assassinated and the peace process faltered, so did Labor’s political fortunes. It enjoyed a short bout of success under the leadership of Ehud Barak, then went into a tailspin from which it has yet to recover.

Also known as Judeo-Spanish or Judezmo, Ladino is the language of Sephardi Jews; it originated in Spain in the fifteenth century. After their expulsion from Spain in 1492, the majority dispersed throughout the Mediterranean toward the Ottoman Empire. The exiled Jews carried their Castilian dialect with them, adding bits of languages from the countries they traversed and settled in along the way. Grounded in Spanish and Hebrew, Ladino also includes traces of Portuguese, Italian, French, Arabic, Greek, Turkish, and more. For five centuries, Ladino grew into a vibrant language that represented the rich multicultural history of Sephardi life in the Eastern Mediterranean. It was traditionally written with Hebrew characters as well as Solitreo, but is now written with Latin letters. Ladino is still spoken in pockets around the globe, though since World War II, the language has been in steep decline.

The future movie star and genius inventor was born in Vienna and named Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler. When Lamarr was eighteen, the director of one of her earliest films used a special telephoto lens to film her in the nude and to capture her face in what publicity for the film leeringly touted as “the precise moment of rapture,” driving critics to view the movie as sheer pornography. On the boat to New York, fleeing Europe after Hitler’s rise, she met Louis B. Mayer, who was moved by her beauty and not much else, casting her in roles that required very few speaking lines. When World War II broke out, Lamarr volunteered to help, saying that she was an inventor and had a few ideas that might be of use; instead, she was sent on a fundraising tour with a sailor named Eddie, who took the stage every evening asking for a kiss and prompting the audience to donate generously and put Lamarr in a giving mood. None of it, however, deterred the brilliant actress, who was just as brilliant an engineer: although she never received any formal scientific training, she soon learned that radio-controlled torpedoes could be easily jammed by the enemy, so she took to a makeshift lab that she created in her Los Angeles home and developed a frequency-hopping signal that turned out to be an extremely useful development, then and now. If you enjoy, say, Wi-Fi, GPS, or cellular phones, you have Lamarr to thank.

Best known as the author of the poem “The New Colossus” on the base of the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”), Lazarus grew up near Manhattan’s Union Square, part of a wealthy, assimilated Sephardi family. Emma wrote like she was running out of time: by 1882 she’d published dozens of poems and other works and had translated the work of German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine. Ralph Waldo Emerson was her mentor (her poems have aged about as well as his), and she traveled widely, hobnobbing in Europe with Robert Browning, William Morris, and Henry James, who said of her, “You appear to have done more in three weeks than any lightfooted woman before; when you ate or slept I have not yet made definite.” An activist who worked with Russian refugees detained in terrible conditions on Ward’s Island in New York Harbor and volunteered with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the country’s first refugee resettlement agency, it is fitting that her tribute to immigrants is immortalized on a universal symbol of freedom and democracy.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans Jews have come up in the Jewish community in recent years. They’ve established their own synagogues while also fighting for greater inclusion in all congregations. Rabbis in the Reconstructionist, Reform, and Conservative movements can now perform same-sex weddings, and openly LGBT members of those movements can be ordained. Community-based organizations and online communities offer queer Jews of every stripe—including the Orthodox—everything from religious programs to support groups to social events. Queer Jews have also gained tremendous visibility among the wider public: think of politicians like slain San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk or Colorado governor Jared Polis, or performers like actor/comedian Sandra Bernhard or pop singer Troye Sivan, or writers from playwright/screenwriter Paul Rudnick (Addams Family Values, In & Out) to poet Joy Ladin, the first openly trans professor at an Orthodox institution (Yeshiva University). You can see queer Jewish life portrayed on television (Transparent, Andi Mack), film (Call Me by Your Name, or the documentary Trembling Before G-d), and stage (Paula Vogel’s Indecent, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America). You can read about queer Jewish life in dozens of books, from Wrestling with God and Men by openly gay Orthodox rabbi Steven Greenberg, to editor Noach Dzmura’s trans anthology Balancing on the Mechitza, to historian Lillian Faderman’s memoir Naked in the Promised Land, to Lev Raphael’s short-story collection Dancing on Tisha B’Av. Twenty-five years ago, you could have fit all the books ever published about LGBT Jews in a knapsack; today, you need a whole section of the library.

Is cannabis the kaneh bosem plant mentioned in the Bible? Will more rabbis declare medicinal marijuana kosher, as some have these last few years? Will making it legal become the next big project for the tikkun olam crowd? And if not now, when?

The other other Promised Land.

The ancient Jewish practice of full-body immersion in a body of water, which historically was an ocean, lake, or river. Since most Jews don’t have access in all weather to a naturally occurring mikveh, the term usually refers to a constructed mikveh: a bath, housed inside a small building, that holds a portion of natural, flowing water, which can be taken from, for instance, a melting glacier or rain-collecting cistern. The mikveh is central to the Orthodox Jewish lifestyle: women must immerse in the mikveh after their period and after childbirth, and observant men may immerse to purify before a wedding, before High Holidays, or even before morning prayer. But today, many groups have sought to make a mikveh of one’s own: there are men’s mikvaot (the plural), and innovative liturgists have written prayers for women to say when immersing after mastectomies, stillbirths, and divorces. The mikveh has become the place where spiritual Jews of all denominations mark milestones.

According to the anti-Semites, a thing Jews control all of. According to your bank statement, a thing you could use a lot more of.

The MS St. Louis was an ocean liner that embarked from Hamburg, Germany, on May 13, 1939. On board were 937 men, women, and children, the majority of them Jews fleeing Hitler’s advancing agenda. Refused entry by the authorities in Havana, Cuba, the ship’s captain, Gustav Schröder, tried his luck in Canada and the United States, neither of which would open its gates. Despondent, Schröder headed back to Europe, where approximately a quarter of his passengers would eventually be murdered by the Nazis. Schröder was named one of the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, and his ship’s voyage inspired many artistic adaptations, most famously the 1974 novel turned into a 1976 film, Voyage of the Damned.

Hollywood royalty (the daughter of über-WASP actress Blythe Danner and producer-director Bruce Paltrow, descended of Polish rabbis), she won an Oscar at twenty-six for Shakespeare in Love, and named her children Rosh Hashanah–appropriate Apple and Passover-themed Moses. Later she started the Goop wellness empire, then married Brad Falchuk—son of Nancy, former president of Hadassah.

As the Book of Esther tells us, Jews have lived in Iran for a very long time. That more or less ended with the Islamic Revolution of 1979: out of a community of 80,000 to 100,000, more than 60,000 fled, mostly to America or Israel. About 9,000 live in Iran today, facing discrimination from the reigning mullahs. In the United States, lots of Persian Jews can be found in Great Neck, New York, and in Los Angeles.

The academic explanation goes a little something like this: whereas the Grateful Dead were an improvisational rock band founded by bluegrass obsessives, Phish is the creation of four guys whose musical imaginations were steeped in New Wave and prog. The Dead covered Chuck Berry and Woody Guthrie; Phish covered XTC and Zappa. Phish conjoins musical exuberance—jams too giant for even a sober mind to process; palaces made of keyboard and bass; guitar licks so towering that they seem like they’ve been launched at passing satellites or distant solar systems—with the forward-thinking ethos of ’70s and ’80s art rock. The academic explanation is, of course, useless: like ’em or hate ’em, a Phish concert is unlike any other experience in music, one that a true fan hasn’t exhausted even after ten or one hundred shows. Because New York is Phish’s traditional stomping ground, the band boasts a significant Jewish following. Two of the band’s four members (the rhythm section, for what it’s worth) come from a Jewish background; as of late 2018, the group had performed “Avinu Malkeinu” some eighty times (always after “The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday”) and “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav” twelve times, most recently on New Year’s Eve in 1994.

Firstborn sons are a big deal in the Bible—just ask Pharaoh. Because God spared the Israelites the terrible plague of the death of the firstborn, Jewish law says every Jewish father must, thirty days after the birth of his first male child, pay a kohen—a direct descendant of Aaron, Moses’s brother and the first Israelite priest—a few silver coins in order to redeem the child and secure for him a long and happy life. Naturally, a festive meal follows this ceremony.

Something Jews used to do! Jews in the Greco-Roman world proselytized, and successfully. They stopped when the people who ruled them—the Roman empire in its Christian phase, then Islam, then numerous emperors and kings of Christendom—told them to stop. They stopped because they didn’t want to get killed. But while many contemporary Jews cherish the myth that we never proselytized, believing that it makes Judaism a tolerant, universalistic tradition, there is no actual Jewish prohibition on trying to convert others.

The book you’re made to read when you are inducted into the international cabal that controls the media, banking, and Hollywood.* *Just kidding: It’s a hoax created by czarist Russian police to slander the Jews. That so many people have since believed it to be true, and that so many believe it still, tells you just how dumn anti-semites truly are.

As leader of the incalculably influential Velvet Underground in the late 1960s, and as a solo artist whose discography stretched from the 1970s until his death in 2013, Lou Reed epitomized the rock-and-roller as hard-bitten poet. Raised in a Jewish family on Long Island, Reed was a bridge-and-tunnel suburbanite who immigrated to the big city and became more definitively a New Yorker than any native. Reed’s songs were blunt and acerbic, casting a withering eye on sex, drugs, and the downtown demimonde he inhabited as a member of Andy Warhol’s inner circle. The landmark glam-rock album Transformer (1972) yielded his most famous song, “Walk on the Wild Side”; Berlin (1973) was a morbid and beautiful rock opera; Metal Machine Music (1975) was a pure sonic assault; and The Blue Mask (1982) was one of the rock era’s great contemplations of marriage.

Imagine you’ve made a decision to leave the hated country of your birth, a place where you couldn’t practice your religion or even claim your cultural identity. You must inform everyone, from your boss to all the people who live in your apartment building. You have to tell your friends that you no longer wish to be fellow citizens with them. And then your request for an exit visa—the necessary document to step foot outside the country—is rejected, refused. This was the experience for tens of thousands of Jews living in the Soviet Union from the late 1960s until the late 1980s, when the gates were finally opened. They became pariahs simply for stating their desire to emigrate. By creating this underclass of refuseniks (otkazniki in Russian), the Soviet Union also seeded a dedicated group of underground activists. Condemned to waiting (sometimes for months, often years, or even decades) for permission to leave and thrown out of Soviet society, the refuseniks in their liminal state had little left to lose and kept agitating to get out. The most high profile of them—names like Sharansky and Slepak and Nudel—became causes célèbres in the West. It was only when they were refused no longer that it was clear the Soviet Union was changing.

Jewish American members of the Communist Party accused of divulging atomic-weapons secrets to the Soviet Union; they were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage and executed in 1953. Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, worked at the nuclear laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and passed information to Ethel. The Rosenbergs’ trial and conviction came at the height of McCarthyite anticommunist fervor in the United States, and their supporters were convinced that the couple had been framed or railroaded (indeed, there were irregularities in the trial). Given the Rosenbergs’ obvious Jewishness, the case always had undertones of anti-Semitism, and many remain convinced that it was no accident that the only Americans ever executed for treason were a couple of working-class New York Jews. Despite international attention to the case and substantial pressure to commute their sentences, they went to the electric chair at Sing Sing. In the years since, new information has reinforced the prosecution’s case, and most scholars now agree that both husband and wife were spies, with Julius playing a greater part than his wife. Fun historical fact: One member of the prosecution team was Roy Cohn, later a mentor to Donald Trump.

Character in The Godfather: Part II based on Meyer Lansky, one of the most notorious Jewish gangsters during the 1920s and ’30s, and a good friend of Lucky Luciano (the father of the modern Mafia). See Jewish Gangsters, page 106.

Joel Russ arrived in Manhattan from Poland in 1907 and eked out a living selling schmaltz herring out of a barrel on the Lower East Side. When he saved a bit of money, he bought a pushcart. By 1914, he had earned enough to open a small store, and in 1920 he managed to move to a slightly bigger location on nearby East Houston Street. It stands there still: bucking the tradition of the time, he made his three daughters partners in 1935, renaming the store Russ & Daughters and turning it into an appetizing empire.

What’s the difference? An old joke explains it: The schlemiel is the moron who orders hot coffee on an airplane and then carelessly spills it all over the guy sitting next to him. The schlimazel? He’s the guy sitting next to him. For those who wish to go deeper on this topic, see the title sequence to the old ABC half-hour comedy Laverne & Shirley, which begins with the unforgettable chant, “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8! Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated.”

The nectar of the gods: rendered chicken fat. You can spread it on bread, use it to roast potatoes, or, in keeping with tradition, use it to fry meat, since the more goyish butter is prohibited from that usage by the laws of kashrut. While some art-world twits use it to mean that which is “overwrought” and “maudlin,” others still hear the word and think warmly of Jewish cooking. Hence the expression “to fall into the schmaltz pot,” meaning to catch a very lucky break.

The First Temple, built by King Solomon in Jerusalem, was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE when the city was captured and the Jews sent into exile. The exile was mercifully short lived, and the Jews returning home got busy rebuilding their spiritual center anew atop Mount Moriah, on the exact spot where Abraham was said to have tied Isaac to the altar, ready to sacrifice his only child to God. Around 20 BCE, Herod, the Roman-appointed king of Judea, began an extravagant renovation of the Temple, and was said to have employed one thousand priests as carpenters and masons to make sure the Temple was thoroughly holy. His grand masterpiece, however, wasn’t long for the world: In 66 CE, the Jews rebelled against the Romans, and four years later the Roman general Titus marched in with his legions and burned much of Jerusalem—the Temple included—to the ground. Jews the world over mark this tragedy on the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, a day of mourning known as Tisha B’Av. On that day, Jews lament not just the destruction of the Second Temple but all the catastrophes that ever befell the Jewish people. The only remnant of the Second Temple is a segment of the external fortifying wall, known as the Western Wall, or the Kotel.

If you are a Jew who has ever wanted to change your name, your hair, your nose, or your accent, you might be a little self-hating. Join the club, the club known as the human race. It’s impossible, especially as a member of a historically stigmatized people, not to have moments of self-hating. With some Jews, the self-hatred becomes a big problem, and these Jews will get visibly uncomfortable around other Jews, or when somebody outs them as a fellow Jew (see bageling) or when too much Yiddish is dropped in a conversation. They are also the first to make it clear that they don’t bargain-hunt, or approve of the Israeli government, or take off work for Yom Kippur (it’s not that they say these things, it’s how they say them). You don’t want to be a Jew like that. Most of us are, sometimes. Fight it.

One of the most important children’s books writers and illustrators of the twentieth century. Where the Wild Things Are made him a star, propelling generations of bores to argue whether it’s meant as a Freudian allegory or a postcolonialist takedown, but inspiring millions of kids to put on a little crown and roar. He also illustrated the Little Bear book series, written by Else Holmelund Minarik. A committed atheist, Sendak remained deeply attached to his Jewish roots. One of his last major works was an illustration of Tony Kushner’s Brundibár, based on a children’s opera most famously performed in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

What’s a settlement? The question isn’t as easy as it may seem. Tel Aviv University, for example, the alma mater of more or less the entire Israeli left, was built on top of Al-Shaykh Muwannis, a Palestinian village abandoned in 1948, about a month before Israel’s War of Independence. To some Palestinians, every Israeli community built since the first Jews in the modern era returned to their ancient land in the 1880s qualifies as a settlement. To some Israelis, there’s no such thing as a settlement, because the towns most commonly referred to as settlements happen to be smack in the middle of the biblical cradle of the Jewish people. To all but political philosophers and partisans, however, the term describes the Jewish communities built in Judea and Samaria—also known as the West Bank—after Israel took these territories in the Six-Day War. As of 2017, there are slightly more than four hundred thousand Jews living east of the Green Line, the border as it stood prior to the 1967 war, not including the Jews living in East Jerusalem, which some Palestinians consider occupied territory but which Israel officially annexed in 1980. Did we say this stuff is complicated? It is, even more so because of the fierce dispute over the legality of the settlements: Israel claims they’re legal according to international law and stresses the right of Jews to once again dwell in their historical homeland. Many in the international community disagree. Still, the vitriol that is often applied to discussions of “settlers” obscures the point that this large population of people is incredibly diverse, from ideological, religious true believers to the family of four that just wanted a nicer house with a better view. Any future arrangement achieved in any future peace treaty will have to take all these nuances into account.

Observing the Sabbath and need someone to turn on the stove, turn off the lights, or perform other small tasks forbidden by halacha, or Jewish law? That’s what a Shabbos goy is for. Just ask Elvis, Jackie Robinson, Colin Powell, Martin Scorsese, and Harry S. Truman, all of whom reportedly did their Jewish neighbors a solid by occasionally helping out on Shabbat. As with any Jewish loophole, this one isn’t without contention: many religious Jews frown upon outsourcing these Shabbat-prohibited tasks, even in a pinch. (Also, some people believe Elvis is actually Jewish, but that’s for another day . . . )

Derogatory term for a non-Jewish woman; you’ll often hear this word said about a woman who has married (or is dating) a nice Jewish boy. While some such women have embraced the term (see shiksappeal), it remains, for the most part, a degrading thing to call someone.

According to Jewish law, a man and a woman who are not married are prohibited to touch each other in any manner, as it may lead to lustful activities (or mixed dancing). Still, some rabbis believe that if someone of the opposite sex holds out his or her hand, you should always shake it, because being shomer negiah doesn’t mean you should make other people feel awkward. Like so many things about Jewish law, this one, too, is complicated. Oh, and it’s also the reason why you’re likely to see some male Orthodox passengers holding up El Al flights by insisting they can’t sit next to female passengers. You know, because nothing is more lustful than accidently touching the person sitting next to you in couch on an eleven-hour flight.

Also known as the 1967 War. For two decades following Israel’s founding in 1948, the Jewish state’s relationship with its Arab neighbors remained tense, with military skirmishes breaking out regularly. Tensions flared up in May 1967, when Egypt’s leader Gamel Abdel Nasser announced that he was closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. A week later, he signed a pact with the Jordanians, who promptly invited the Iraqi army to deploy soldiers and armed units close to the Israeli border. Fearing an imminent attack, Israel formed a National Unity Government in early June and decided on a preemptive attack. At 7:45 a.m. on June 5, the Israeli Air Force launched Operation Focus, which destroyed most of Egypt’s bombers and fighter jets. War immediately broke out, with Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq, joined by Syria, fighting Israel. Despite having fewer than half as many soldiers as their opponents, the IDF prevailed, with the overwhelmed Arab armies agreeing to a ceasfire six days later on June 10. By the end of the war, Israel had seized the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. Of these, only East Jerusalem was officiall annexed to Israel. Photographs of Israeli paratroopers praying at the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest spot, which for decades had been inaccessible to Jews, became instantly iconic, with many in Israel and around the world seeing the victory as a divine miracle. The war’s outcome, however, soon spawned many earthly challenges, with Israel now governing millions of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, a conflict that simmers still.

From Marx to Trotsky to Rosa Luxemburg, Jews were the authors of much of socialist history, and if Bernie Sanders is any indication, our revolutionary game is still strong. See Radical Jews, page 212; Politics and Jews, page 200.

Half-human, half-Vulcan science officer aboard the USS Enterprise and voice of logic to Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) as they zoom across the galaxy in the twenty-third century (or on television’s Star Trek, 1966–1969). Played by Leonard Nimoy, who was raised Orthodox in Boston, Spock (or Mr. Spock, if you want to get formal) was one of the late 1960s’ unlikely sex symbols. His unusual look, with pointy ears and eyebrows, never let the viewer forget his outsider status as a Vulcan. The Vulcans’ complex belief system, ancient wisdom, harsh dogma, and preoccupation with study and knowledge could easily be read as Jewish. The planet of Vulcan is hot, like Israel, and if you pay attention you’ll see that Spock is quite often zinging his colleagues and making great jokes—it’s just that those around him are seldom up to his level of intelligence. The famous Vulcan salute, devised on set by Nimoy himself, is based on the Kohanim’s priestly blessing. The hand gesture and the optimism associated with the accompanying phrase “live long and prosper” has become a reference not just to Star Trek but to space exploration in general. There’s even a Vulcan salute emoji. Spock was famously eulogized by his friend Kirk, who said: “Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most human.”

The palm-shaped hamsa will protect you against the evil eye. So will spitting three times. When you’re sewing, chew on thread: it indicates that you’re still alive, because, you know, the deceased have their shrouds sewn around them. When you sneeze, tug on your ears, and repeat the pleasing Yiddish phrase tzu langehmazaldikker yohrn, or “here’s to long, lucky ears.” Always close an open book—not doing so invites demons to steal the knowledge that’s inside and use it against you. Put some salt in your pockets and in the corners of the room, because demons hate it. Those are some Jewish superstitions; your bubbe knows more.

Jewish shorthand for Holocaust survivor. The potential for semantic confusion is the basis of a Curb Your Enthusiasm subplot in which Larry David brings a Holocaust survivor to a dinner party only to find out the other survivor in attendance is a former contestant on the reality show Survivor.

Technically, we have two Talmuds: the Babylonian, completed around the year 500 CE in Iran (then known as Babylonia), and the Yerushalmi, also known as the Jerusalem or Palestinian Talmud, which was completed around one hundred years earlier in the land of Israel. But when people talk about the Talmud, they’re usually referring to the Babylonian. It is the central compendium of Jewish law, theology, rituals, and customs, serving as the guide for daily life for all Jews for millennia. The Talmud, or Gemara, is a text that is a commentary on the Mishnah.

The source of one of the biggest Jewish urban legends. The fuss over Jews and tattoos comes from Leviticus 19:28, which reads: “You shall not make cuts in your flesh for a person [who died]. You shall not etch a tattoo on yourselves. I am the Lord.” This commandment follows one about not cutting your beard, but to our knowledge, no one has been kept out of a cemetery for improper beard length and you won’t be for having a tattoo, either. Some suggest that the reason behind these prohibitions was to separate the Jews from pagans, who frequently were tattooed and clean-shaven. The taboo on tattoos was complicated after the Holocaust, during which Auschwitz prisoners had numbers permanently inked onto their forearms.

Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935) was a French Jew and a captain in the French Army who was falsely accused of spying for Germany in 1894. Despite a lack of evidence, the French Army and government leaders moved to have him convicted at trial, then again at a second trial once the first was challenged. Known as the Dreyfus Affair, his trial revealed the ongoing pervasive anti-Semitism in French society and had deep ramifications for the Jewish people. Most significant, one of the people present at his ceremony of dishonor, where Dreyfus was stripped of his medals and had his sword broken before being exiled to Devil’s Island, was Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. A young journalist and secular Jew, Herzl was struck by how the angry mob not only called Dreyfus a traitor but chanted “Death to the Jews!” Herzl concluded that Jews in any society would always become the scapegoats, and here began his dream for a modern return to the Promised Land. The proceedings also so outraged public intellectual and novelist Émile Zola that he published a fiery defense of Dreyfus, “J’accuse,” which accused France of sullying its honor with the false conviction. For this, Zola was convicted of libel and forced to flee to England. Dreyfus himself was eventually exonerated, although his trial remains a flash point in the history of Jews and modern Europe.

According to some critics, a pro-Israel rag run by unrepentant Zionists. According to other critics, an anti-Israel rag run by self-loathing assimilated Jews. Both groups of critics are this close to canceling their subscriptions.

Not kosher. A ham and cheese sandwich is treyf. Shrimp cocktail—treyf. But like all the best Yiddish words, this one means more than it means. Anything that’s really out of bounds, subversive, especially in a non-Jewish way, is treyf. A communion wafer might technically be kosher, but it’s, you know, super treyf.

On March 25, 1911, against the backdrop of contentious strikes for workers’ rights and workplace safety, a women’s blouse factory in Greenwich Village caught fire. The workers, mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant girls, had been locked inside to prevent theft. Somehow a scrap of fabric on the eighth floor caught fire, and within minutes, the building was ablaze. The fire department’s ladders and hoses couldn’t reach the eighth floor. Hallways were impassable; exits were too few; fire escapes collapsed under the weight of too many bodies. Girls leapt to their deaths, died of smoke inhalation, were burned alive. The final death count was 146, making the Triangle fire the greatest workplace disaster in New York history until 9/11. Factory owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris got off, as rich folks do, thanks in large part to defense attorney Max Steuer’s devastating work discrediting a young survivor, Kate Alterman (his cross-examination technique is still taught in law schools today). But the fire had a huge impact on child-labor laws, workplace regulations, union representation, building codes, fire safety, and firefighting equipment.

Literally “modesty,” but in practice, usually a list of rules concerning what girls and women can wear and do. Don’t be too naked. Don’t wear clothing associated with the “opposite gender.” Don’t be too loud, verbally or visually. Watch the hemlines. As a song popular in Jewish day schools (sung to the tune of the “Colonel Bogey March,” aka “Hitler Has Only One Big Ball”) put it: “Tznius, it is our battle cry! / Tznius, you’d better do or die! / Tznius, cover your knee-us! / Cover your elbows, and shoulders, and thighs!” Of course, different communities have different standards of modesty (How thick must a woman’s stockings be? Must married women wear wigs? Is it a sin for men to even hear kol isha, a woman’s singing voice?) and different opinions about whether “modesty” oppresses or liberates women. Modern Orthodox Jews view Talmudic statements about tznius as open to interpretation, and Reform Jews have dismissed male/female binary dictates about clothing and public participation in Jewish ritual life. But if anyone wants to cover their knee-us, they should feel free-us to make that choice.

Yiddish for garish, overdone, overly busy, in poor taste.

Workers’ organizations developed in the nineteenth century in the wake of the mass urbanization and brutal working conditions produced by the Industrial Revolution. Unions assert labor’s collective bargaining power in the face of the otherwise overwhelming dominance of owners and bosses. The prominent role of Jews in labor unions started in Europe and carried over into America after great waves of immigration in the early twentieth century brought to American cities Jewish Bundists, anarchists, Social Democrats, socialists, and communists, each with their own ideas about how to syndicalize, collectivize, and unionize labor. Jewish labor leaders like David Dubinsky, Benjamin Stolberg, and Alex Rose were especially prominent in the garment and fur trades, where Jews clustered. The Jewish role in unions gradually declined as the garment trades either moved to the southern United States or out of the country altogether, and as Jews moved into white-collar professions.

Russian-born photographer best known for his iconic photographs of Eastern European Jews in the years before the Holocaust. Vishniac’s photos show religious Jews living in shtetl poverty and were for a long time the primary images Americans had of prewar Jewish life in Europe: pious and poor. However, when the International Center of Photography acquired Vishniac’s archive in 2010, research revealed that Vishniac had been commissioned by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to document daily life in the shtetls as part of the organization’s fund-raising effort—suggesting that his photos were not meant to be a perfect representation of pre-war Jewish life but a selective window into one slice of it, caught for posterity in nostalgia’s amber.

In the summer of 1942, the Nazis conducted mass deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka, sending more than 250,000 Jews to near certain death. In April 1943, facing the liquidation of the ghetto, resistance fighters sprang into action. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was a monthlong Maccabean battle, ending with the ghetto burned to the ground and most of its inhabitants dead.

Romanian-born survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald who became a journalist, novelist, playwright, and living symbol. His great achievement was Night (1960), which was translated into thirty languages and reminded an already-forgetting world that it should never forget. If you’ve read one Holocaust book, it’s Anne Frank’s diary; if you’ve read two, the other is Night. “To read it is to lose one’s own innocence about the Holocaust all over again,” critic Ruth Franklin wrote in 2006. The book is “almost unbearably painful, and certainly beyond criticism,” A. Alvarez wrote in Commentary. Indeed, Wiesel was, in the eyes of many, beyond criticism. During his last five and a half decades, he wrote dozens more books but remained more influential as a teacher, lecturer, activist, and survivor—he was, indeed, the world’s most famous survivor. In 1986, he won the Nobel Peace Prize, but more important was his 1980 appointment to President Jimmy Carter’s Holocaust Memorial Council, which eventually got the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum built.

Tremendously talented pop, jazz, and R&B singer-songwriter thrown to the wolves of fame. Born in North London, she released her first album, Frank, when she was just nineteen. With Back to Black (2006), she became an international sensation. But her life was soon a media circus, with the tabloid machine pushing her toward ever more damaging behavior. Her hummable, upbeat “Rehab” is painful to listen to now, as it lightly brushes aside her early addiction problems (and states that her father urged her to keep working instead of taking care of herself). Winehouse died at age twenty-seven from alcohol abuse.

The popular comic book series, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, revolves around the relationship between Charles Xavier, or Professor X, and Max Eisenhardt, or Magneto, two powerful mutants with very different views on how to treat poor, ordinary humans. They meet in a Haifa clinic for traumatized Holocaust survivors— Magneto is a survivor himself, having discovered his powers in Auschwitz—and strike up a fraught friendship sustained by conversations about revenge versus forgiveness, faith versus disbelief, and other issues that animated Jewish emotional and intellectual life in the second half of the twentieth century. Forget the mostly schlocky blockbuster movies: the comic books remain as profound a meditation on otherness, prejudice, and genocide as any American work produced before or since.

According to some scholars, Yemenite Jews should be considered a distinct community of Jews, like Ashkenazi or Sephardi Jews. Archaeological evidence suggests Jews may have lived in Yemen starting as early as the third century BCE, with many involved in the spice trade. Kept in relative isolation inside their mountainous nation, they developed their own customs and traditions and are known for their erudition in Torah and Talmud. Facing persecution, many Yemenite Jews immigrated to Israel in 1949 and 1950. In the 1980s, the Yemenite Israeli singer Ofra Haza became an international pop sensation when she chanted a few of the community’s traditional prayers set to dance music.

Yiddish for a gossip or busybody. Some people think a yenta is a matchmaker, but that’s incorrect; the mix-up is likely due to Fiddler on the Roof, in which the matchmaker happens to be named Yente.

Hollywood’s first Jewish feminist musical, starring and directed by Barbra Streisand. The culmination of years of work, this 1983 adaptation of an Isaac Bashevis Singer story is a remarkable look at shtetl history and chauvinism, and doesn’t lack for laughs, either. The headstrong Yentl secretly studies Torah and, after the death of her father, cuts her hair, pretends to be a boy, and attends a yeshiva. Trouble comes when she falls in love with her classmate, played by Mandy Patinkin, and ends up in an arranged marriage with the girl Mandy loves (Amy Irving). It gets complicated! “What kind of a creature are you?” “I’m just a woman!” is just one of the timeless lines of dialogue in this extraordinary film.

Yiddish literally means “Jewish,” whether as an adjective or in the nominative, pointing to the language spoken by Ashkenazi Yidn (Jews). The generally agreed-upon statistic is that in 1939 there were something like 13 million Yiddish speakers. Today the number is a fraction of that, more like 1.5 million (although this is likely a dramatic undercount). Given that Yiddish-speaking Haredi populations in Israel and the United States (and elsewhere, to a lesser extent) are exploding, it’s unlikely that Yiddish will become extinct in the near future, as was once presumed— indeed, the average age of the Yiddish speaker will actually drop. Yiddish and modern German share a common linguistic ancestor in Middle High German but are now separated by about a thousand intervening years, as well as the global diasporic dispersion of Yiddish speakers. Linguist Yudel Mark wrote that among European languages, Yiddish has a relatively large number of words due in part to its status as a fusion language. Yiddish contains Germanic, Slavic, Latin, Romance, and loshn koydesh (Hebrew-Aramaic) elements. Yiddish contains within itself the whole of European Jewish history, as well as expressing the genius of that experience, one of dynamic creativity of a cohesive cultural minority within a sometimes welcoming, sometimes hostile, ethnopolitical majority.

At 1:55 p.m. on October 6, 1973, Syria and Egypt launched a massive joint attack on Israel. It came as a shock for two reasons: First of all, it was Yom Kippur, and many Israelis were fasting and praying in synagogue. Second of all, Israeli intelligence, badly misreading ample warning signs, had issued a report the day before assessing that the probability of war was low. For the first five days, things seemed dire for Israel, with the IDF scrambling to recruit and mobilize its reservists. Then, however, the tide turned, with the IDF defeating the Syrians and forging deep into Egypt, stopping sixty-two miles from Cairo. The war quickly sparked conflict between the Soviet Union, which supported and armed Egypt, and the United States— President Richard Nixon sent Israel massive military aid, helping it overpower its enemies. Wishing to avoid a major Cold War conflagration, however, the Americans pressured Israel not to proceed any farther into Egypt, which brought the war to its end. The bitter defeat shocked the Arab world and contributed to Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s willingness to make peace with Israel four years later.

Television’s most famous convert to Judaism. Charlotte was one of the four main characters—the least vulgar, and usually the most romantic—on HBO’s Sex and the City (1998–2004) and in the subsequent movies. Played by Kristin Davis, Charlotte underwent a dramatic transformation over the course of the series. Her first husband was the uptight (and impotent) WASP Trey MacDougal (Kyle MacLachlan), but her real bashert was to be Harry Goldenblatt (Evan Handler). Even though he was bald and sweaty and a bit rough around the edges, she fell for him. Before they could get married, Charlotte converted to Judaism. Viewers watched the whole thing, from her Shabbat dinners to her meetings with the rabbi to her visit to the mikveh. The most memorable line comes when her next-door neighbor emerges as Charlotte is nailing a mezuzah to her door and asks, “What on earth is all that banging?” Charlotte replies, without missing a beat: “Oh, good morning, Mrs. Collier. I’m a Jew now. How are you?”

Zionism is the political movement to establish Jewish self-rule in the historic Jewish homeland, Israel. The Jewish religious and cultural attachment to the land of Israel runs deep: references to Zion and Jerusalem— home of Judaism’s Temples and holiest sites—are rife in Jewish liturgy and literature, with countless Jewish writers expressing a longing to return to them. Though Jews maintained a presence in the land for centuries, and repeatedly returned, the majority was ultimately exiled. Thus, the Passover Seder, the world’s most- observed Jewish ritual, ends with the exhortation, “Next year in Jerusalem!” Building upon this ancient bedrock, modern Zionism first took shape as a national movement in nineteenth-century Europe. After centuries of being murdered in pogroms, forced into ghettos, and barred from full participation in civic and cultural life, many European Jews came to the conclusion that true Jewish flourishing could only be achieved under Jewish self-rule. As a minority, they believed, Jews would be forever persecuted by hostile gentile majorities; Jews would only be able to defend and actualize themselves by governing themselves in their own nation state. Led by Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl, who convened the First Zionist Congress in 1897, the Zionist movement began sending waves of pioneers to settle the land of Israel, and ultimately proclaimed a Jewish state in 1948. Today, Israel is home to half of the world’s Jewish population. Even as it succeeded as a political movement, Zionism had its dissenters. Ultra-Orthodox religious leaders opposed it on the grounds that the movement was led by secular Jews like Herzl and preempted the Messiah, who was traditionally believed to be the one to lead Jews back to Israel. Others in the more liberal American Jewish establishment worried that the existence of a Jewish state would cause their countrymen to question their loyalties. Much of this sentiment was tempered or died away in the decades after Israel’s successful founding, but in recent years, new forms of anti-Zionism have arisen in their place. Today, ardently antinationalist Jews oppose the very existence of a Jewish state, seeing it as an ethnocentric anachronism and an affront to universalism. Some pro-Palestinian advocates and their allies call for replacing the Jewish state with a non-Jewish one. Thus, while contemporary debates over Zionism may seem like mere debates over this-or-that policy of this-or-that Israeli administration, at their core, these arguments are often also fundamentally about how Jews should exist in the world. Do Jews need a homeland where they are not governed by gentiles, and where they can foster their own majority culture and protect themselves with their own army? Or should Jews simply live as dispersed minorities in non-Jewish nations?