Tag: identity

My first visit to Israel in the summer of 1959 coincided to an extent with the trip by Rabbi Aharon Kotler, the great rosh yeshiva of Lakewood, who came to give shiurim at Yeshiva Eitz Chaim in Jerusalem and to campaign for Agudath Israel in the Knesset elections, as he had done previously in the decade.

Natan Sharansky has been a hero of mine ever since I learned this courageous refusenik refused to be exchanged for two spies without the Book of Psalms he had treasured for nine torturous years in Soviet prisons.

Techeles, the blue strings the Torah requires Jews to wear on their ritual tzitzis garments, has long been thought of as a "dead" mitzvah. Sometime in the 7th century apparently (possibly due to the Arab conquest of Israel) Jews stopped producing techeles strings and the identity of the chilazon, from which the blue dye originates, was subsequently lost.

Perhaps upholding Leviticus 19:31, which insists, "Do not turn to those who worship Ob or to wizards; do not desire to become defiled by them,"

In a 1972 study, Stanley Milgram found that "familiar strangers" who share a repeated experience (like riding the same bus every day) are likelier to communicate when cast into an unfamiliar setting, than are two strangers with no such shared experience.

As well spouses, we know the effect of chronic illness on ourselves. We know how it robs us of our dreams, our future, even our identity.

For most of my life, I lived a Clark Kent existence: that of a Jew residing in Manchester, England, intent on blending into the modern, secular world.

There is something very Jewish about R. B. Kitaj's work.

Even Alfred Molina's "Tevye" may have sounded more Jewish than Adam Heller's Haskell Harelik in "The Immigrant," but nevertheless, the characterization of Jewish life in this play succeeds with powerful impact.

Amid the rising action in Disney's "The Lion King," Simba - already a dashing mature lion - follows the monkey, Rafiki, through marshland, until arriving at a loch.

The Jewish Museum has a story to tell in "My America: Art From The Jewish Museum Collection, 1900-1955."

The need to reassert a shattered cultural identity should be familiar to Jews.

Who are you? Who am I? Questions of cultural identity among artists have raged from the early twentieth century to yesterday's memoir.

In his autobiography, My Life, Marc Chagall (1887-1985) recounts a pogrom he witnessed in Russia in 1917.