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a safe space

A favorite rhetorical format in the Talmud is one in which a sage verbally faces off with a mighty opponent. The format implies that an antagonism relocated away from an arena of physical rivalry and into the realm of knowledge is one in which the sages are guaranteed the triumphant last word. But as the scholar Mira Balberg argues, such a verbal contest did not only function to “solidify rabbinic standing,” it also allowed the rabbis a safe space to grapple with theological, political and aesthetic questions and doubts without crossing boundaries of faith and tradition.

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Those who do not remember the past are ... probably not Jewish

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The seminal role that Felix Frankfurter enjoys in American Jewish history is riddled with irony: he shed his yarmulke long before donning his judicial robes.

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Jerada and Oujda

42

The number of unarmed Jewish civilians murdered by angry mobs on June 7th and 8th 1948 in Jerada and Oujda in Northeastern Morrooco. The massacres followed Israel’s declaration of statehood and Sultan Mohammed V’s public affirmation of the Jews’ traditional protected status in Morocco.

Tablet Magazine; original images Wikimedia; Library of Congress
Tablet Magazine; original images Wikimedia; Library of Congress
Zionism and Bolshevism

In 1917, two answers to Russia’s ‘Jewish Question’ swept west and helped transform the world

In a memorable passage, Sir Isaiah Berlin wrote: “A Russian radical of the last century once observed that his country, compared to the West, had a great deal of geography but little history. It might be said that with Jews the opposite pertains: more than enough history, too little geography.” During the time available to me I shall endeavor to cover some of the main events of the period 1914 to 1919, both in history and in geography, and particularly those of 1917; events which shaped, molded, and changed the course of Jewish history. The year 1913 finished with the trial of a little known Jew, Mendel Beiliss; the jury, composed of very ordinary Russian and Ukrainian people, found him not guilty of murdering, for ritual purposes, the Christian boy, Andrey Yuschinsky. The revival by the Czarist Government of the medieval blood libel portrayed more than anything else the full decadence of the whole system. The trial in Kiev shook the Russian Jews to their foundation; this time, however, they were not alone. Leading Russian writers, intellectuals, Liberals, and Socialists—and even some Conservatives—denounced the accusation and the way the trial was conducted. World public opinion was horrified that in the twentieth century such barbarous accusations against a whole people could occur, and the Western World condemned Nicholas II himself as the chief culprit for this outrage. Many people in Russia, and outside, were conscious that the Czar gave open patronage to the Union of the Russian People (the “Black Hundreds,” who were chiefly responsible for starting the Beiliss Trial), financed their publications, and, moreover, “he was an honorary member of the Society,” and “wore the party emblem.”...

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YIVO Encyclopedia

“Three panels from a cycle of paintings documenting the work of the Prague Burial Society: sewing shrouds, washing and preparing the deceased for burial, and digging the grave.”

(Oil on canvas, 1780)

judengasse

jüdisches museum frankfurt

A lithograph depicting the Haupt Synagogue on Judengasse in Frankfurt by artist Anton Burger (1824-1905). The synagogue was built after the great fire in the Judengasse in 1711.

Following a fire and with the redevelopment of Frankfurt’s Judengasse in the second half of the 19th century, the Haupt Synagogue was rebuilt in 1860. The new synagogue would become the spiritual center of Reform Judaism in Frankfurt. It was destroyed during Kristallnacht.

The Börneplatz Synagogue was built in 1882 also on the Judengasse as a synagogue for the Orthodox community. It was designed by Siegfried Kuznitzky and destroyed during Kristallnacht.

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