Judaism Archives - Public Seminar

Literature

Avu Iz Mayn Shmok

An excerpt from Adam Mansbach’s hilarious new novel, The Golem of Brooklyn

November 1, 2023 • by Adam Mansbach

An excerpt from Adam Mansbach's new novel, "The Golem of Brooklyn," a hilarious take on an ancient Jewish folkloric tale....

Literature

First He Parks the Golem In Front of a Television

A conversation with Adam Mansbach about his latest novel, The Golem of Brooklyn

November 1, 2023 • by Adam Mansbach and Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

In a recent conversation at The New School, history professor Natalia Mehlman Petrzela chatted with writer Adam Mansbach about his new novel, The Golem of Brooklyn (One World, 2023), in which ancient Jewish folklore meets contemporary Brooklyn....

First He Parks the Golem In Front of a Television

Europe & Central Asia

The Powers and Limits of Hospitality: Lublin, Poland

The struggle of a culture of hospitality against various forms of exclusion

May 17, 2022 • by Tomasz Kitlinski

This text is thus a tribute to the struggle of a culture of hospitality against various forms of exclusion and to the people who have participated in it, now and in the past. Socially and culturally, the case of Lublin, with its many traditions and many contradictory policies, shows how ...

The Powers and Limits of Hospitality: Lublin, Poland

Uncategorized

Why Phillip Roth is a Great Jewish and a Great American Novelist

A new biography captures the whole man: his kindnesses, his pettiness and his prickeries

April 6, 2021 • by Mitchell Abidor

_____ There will undoubtedly be eye-rolling in some quarters over Blake Bailey’s 800-page biography of Philip Roth, that self-hating Jew/misogynist/self-absorbed relic of an era of history that America has (perhaps) outgrown. And yet, Philip Roth: The Biography – not a biography, the biography – is a book as sensibly, sensitively, and insightfully ...

Why Phillip Roth is a Great Jewish <em>and</em> a Great American Novelist

What Happens When Laws Enforce the Sabbath?

Albeit unknowingly, Israelis today echo the position of early American evangelicals when it comes to protecting the day of rest.

July 30, 2019 • by Rebecca Brenner Graham

The Old Testament says, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work; but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work.” No singular Sabbath day is universal. Generally, Christians ...

The New School

Horace Kallen and the Jewish Roots of The New School

The longest-serving member of the faculty was instrumental in helping Alvin Johnson to organize the University in Exile in 1933

June 27, 2019 • by Matthew J. Kaufman

Kallen's name, it seemed, was indelibly connected to the New School. And yet, it was only an accident of circumstance that this was so. Horace Kallen was among the first lecturers at the New School in Spring of 1919. Probably no one was more surprised at this than he. Beginning in ...

Horace Kallen and the Jewish Roots of The New School

Feature

Collective Amnesia in Post-Communist Poland

Why history, not memory or mythology, is the path to Polish-Jewish reconciliation

June 14, 2019 • by Magda Teter

After WWII, many European countries engaged in what some scholars dubbed “collective amnesia.” Austria, for example, began to redefine itself as the first victim of the Nazis. France amplified the Resistance, forgetting about its Vichy days; Western Germany, after the trials of several high-profile Nazi leaders, allowed for silence to ...

Feature

Forming a New Polish Political Consciousness

Part Three: Confronting Polish Responsibility for the Shoah in Paris

May 8, 2019 • by Izabela Wagner

Editor’s note: in two prior essays on the challenges Polish scholars are confronting in their efforts to bring attention to Polish-responsibility for portions of the Shoah, Prof. Wagner discussed the origins of, and the historical and contemporary resistance to, the New Polish School of the History of the Shoah. In this ...

Forming a New Polish Political Consciousness

Feature

How Media, Political and Religious Elites Shape Plebian Resistance

Part Two: Confronting Polish Responsibility for the Shoah in Paris

April 24, 2019 • by Izabela Wagner

Editor’s note: in the first part of her essay on the challenges Polish scholars are confronting in their efforts to bring attention to Polish-responsibility for portions of the Shoah, Wagner discussed origins of – and the rise of resistance to – the New Polish School of the History of Shoah. In this ...

How Media, Political and Religious Elites Shape Plebian Resistance

Feature

I’m an Orthodox rabbi who is going to start officiating LGBTQ weddings. Here’s why.

If we don’t, we risk further alienation and falling into an abyss of religious irrelevance by denying these couples their rightful place of belonging.

April 20, 2019 • by Avram Mlotek

A queer friend of mine from a haredi Orthodox background had posed a query publicly on social media. She had attended a conference on LGBTQ inclusion. There she learned a practice of certain Catholic priests who described going into gay bars in full clerical garb: They would sit in the ...

I’m an Orthodox rabbi who is going to start officiating LGBTQ weddings. Here’s why.

Feature

The Mueller Report, the Electoral College, and Arugula Lettuce

Past Present Episode 173

April 2, 2019 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

In this episode, Niki, Neil, and Natalia discuss the Mueller Report, the movement to end the Electoral College, and why not many Americans eat arugula lettuce. Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s long-awaited report has been released, though the public has only received ...

The Mueller Report, the Electoral College, and Arugula Lettuce

Education

What’s So “Jewish” About The New School?

Inventing a parable of pluralism

February 7, 2019 • by Val Vinokur

So what’s so Jewish about The New School? Well, it depends on what you mean by “Jewish.” The simplest -- and most awkwardly Nixonian -- way to answer the question is to count the Jews. When King David tried to do that in 2 Samuel 24, God smote the Israelites with three ...