A new narrative for the coronation of Sabbatai Zevi
The story of a former converso’s invention of the Lurianic ‘ilan’
On salamanders, wondrous creatures, and the early modern blending of the scientific and the magical
How I left Romania for Israel and learned to study without preconceptions
Boro Park, Brooklyn, late 1970s, at the nexus of a cultish hippiedom and ultra-Orthodoxy
How the great kabbalist Isaac Luria changed the perception of the world without changing the world itself
Harmful magic and practical Kabbalah in World War II, on the 74th anniversary of the death of the ‘ruler of the Germans’
National Poetry Month: Wallace Berman’s son pens a memoir of the temple the Kabbalistic Beat artist made of his own life
An Austrian-born American abstract artist arrives at 87 annī and amazes anew
A remarkable record of miracles performed by Ya’akov Arie Guterman on behalf of simple folk in 19th-century Poland
The ‘gematria’ of status updates, in a new book of poetry by a 21st-century heir to the Kabbalists
An important new publication, from manuscript, of first chief rabbi and leading thinker of religious Zionism Abraham Isaac Kook’s hitherto nearly unknown 1890’s spiritual diary reveals a man working out the tensions in his nascent theology
In the gap between transcendental and concrete experience, 48 years after the painter’s death
How the Shin Megami Tensei games make appropriating Jewish culture fun.
An ancient, tiny book cataloging the components of the cosmos: was it magic, Kabbalah, a philosophical treatise, or something else?
This fall season, Hollywood finally catches up with kabbalistic notions of repetition and reincarnation, giving us all one more shot at working through the stories of our lives
What Rabbi Elvis taught me about myself and God
The story of Simhah Isaac Lutski helps explain how Karaite Jews retained their communal and doctrinal coherence amid other competing, more ‘European’ forms of Judaism