The prophet Jeremiah launches this week’s haftorah with a poignant question. Channeling God’s voice, he asks, “What wrong did your forefathers find in Me, that they distanced themselves from Me, and they went after futility and themselves became futile?”
What follows, in the grand prophetic tradition, is a litany of complaints. Again we see the Israelites ...

If the fanatics have their way, Ilana Hammerman might spend the next two years in prison.
An Israeli journalist, Hammerman befriended a teenage Palestinian girl and was heartbroken to learn that, like most Palestinians in the West Bank, the girl—writing about the encounter in Haaretz, Hammerman called the girl Aya to protect her identity—was confined to ...

On a sodden Sunday, I sneak into an abandoned building in the Bronx with Benjy Melendez, a tall mustachioed man and founder of the Ghetto Brothers, a rough street gang that helped give the borough its violent reputation in the late 1960s. We enter through a door whose bolt has already been broken. Once a ...

WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?
There’s nothing like a good countdown to get ready for Tisha B’Av, the day we grieve the destruction of the Temple. To get in a mournful mood, the three weeks prior to Tisha B’Av—known as Bein Ha’Metzarim, or the period between the straits—are marked by a series of fasts and abstinences designed ...

In the matter of the preponderance of existential angst among inanimate objects, few can match Woody, Buzz, and the other characters in the popular Toy Story franchise. Unlike most of cinema’s summer stock—a sticky syrup of expletives and explosions—the series, now in its third installment, revolves around playthings pondering their agency, mortality, and raison d’être. ...

The hyperactive Jewishness of New York has never been a relief to me. A Jew by birth, I grew up an atheist in the former Soviet Union, moving to the United States when I was 9. My Soviet childhood was so comprehensively different from American life that, even more than 20 years later, my primary ...

When I was a kid, I always thought that Hebrew Book Week was a legitimate holiday , something that fit comfortably amid Independence Day, Lag B’Omer, and Hanukkah. On this occasion, we didn’t sit around campfires, spin dreidels, or hit each other on the head with plastic hammers, and, unlike other holidays, it doesn’t commemorate ...