יום שלישי, ט״ו תמוז תשפ״וTuesday, June 30, 2026
Follow Us
Saul Jay Singer serves as Senior Legal Ethics Counsel with the District of Columbia Bar and is a collector of extraordinary original Judaica documents and letters. He welcomes comments at sauljsing@gmail.com. Before commencing his career as a litigator and legal ethicist, he served for fourteen years as an actuary for several ratemaking organizations and insurance companies and as actuary for the National Flood Insurance Program.
Read More
Deprived of formal academic training, he pursued mathematics through private study and informal mentorship, drawing on books, correspondence, and engagement with learned societies. Far from hindering him, this unconventional path fostered an independence of thought that would later allow him to see patterns in demographic data that others had missed.
Stripped of slogans and emotion, his statement invites a serious historical question. If Palestine was a country, when exactly did it exist? This is no mere rhetorical trick. Countries leave records, they have governments, capitals, rulers, borders, laws, armies, currencies, and diplomatic relations.
Historians of American education and Jewish life have noted that his dictionary familiarized non-Jewish Americans with Hebrew-derived terms without attaching stigma to Jewish identity, but for Jewish educators, this was a double-edged sword...
Born consistently resisted efforts by younger physicists to portray Einstein as obsolete or reactionary, and he publicly emphasized Einstein’s foundational role in creating the conceptual framework without which quantum theory itself could not exist.
Israel has consistently maintained that the blockade exists to prevent the importation of weapons and military materiel into Hamas-controlled territory, a claim that is strongly supported by the historical evidence.
Although he did not court the approval of Jewish newspapers, he was acutely aware of their influence in liberal circles, writing privately that “Approval or disapproval in the Jewish press is of minor concern, provided that the law stands and the state remains firm.”
Wells exemplifies a strain of liberal thought that underestimated the resilience of antisemitism and overestimated the protective power of universal ideals.
This week I continue with a discussion of six additional popular toys that were created by Jewish inventors.
One of the most enduring controversies surrounding Barbie concerns the question of originality; critics argued that Ruth had appropriated the idea from the Bild Lilli doll and that full credit should therefore not accrue to her.
He was certainly not a charismatic hero in the mold of Moshe Dayan, nor a political visionary like Ben Gurion. Rather, he represented the disciplined, professional officer whose contributions were essential to the survival and consolidation of the State of Israel.
As exhibitions grew more competitive, pilots from other schools pushed for higher speeds, steeper dives, and more dangerous stunts. Wilbur and Orville Wright were steadfast in resisting this trend, emphasizing control and structural integrity, an ethos passionately embraced by Welsh.
For all his caution, Pius XII never suggested that it was wrong to fight Nazi Germany; rather, he operated within a long-standing Catholic moral framework that recognized the tragic necessity of war under certain conditions: the “Just War Theory,” which does not glorify violence; it constrains it.
Today, Habima retains institutional and symbolic prominence as Israel’s official national theatre and it is widely treated as a foundational institution in modern Hebrew theatre.
Once he became Michael Boaz Israel, Cresson’s energies turned with intensity toward the welfare of the Jewish people – spiritually, materially, and politically – and he embraced a life of public Jewish responsibility.
Critics of circumcision frequently frame the issue as one of children’s rights or bodily autonomy, but this framing overlooks the reality that parents routinely make irreversible decisions on behalf of their children in many contexts, including vaccination, medical treatment, and education.
The most explicit discussion of Cohn’s Jewish background may be found in the collection Ferdinand Cohn – Blätter der Erinnerung (“Leaves of Memory,” Breslau 1901) assembled and published by his wife, Pauline.
Cassatt’s expression of high regard for Degas is entirely consistent with her long-standing view and she never wavered in her assessment of his artistic greatness, even after their personal relationship deteriorated over the Dreyfus Affair.
In the wake of Lessing’s killing, newspapers across Europe announced that a bounty had been placed on Einstein’s head, with some accounts reporting the sum as £1,000, a substantial figure for 1933, and another reporting that the price was as high as $5,000.
The 1953 exhibition remains a landmark that is still remembered as Israel’s first internationally sanctioned specialized expo and a milestone in the country’s early public diplomacy.
By contrast, the more nebulous offense of fraud and breach of trust, which sits at the heart of the charges in Cases 1000 and 2000, has long been criticized by legal scholars for its vagueness.
In assessing Rousseau’s relationship to Judaism, it is crucial to recognize how distinctive his position was within the intellectual milieu of his day.
After the war, Meitner moved to Cambridge, England, where she spent the last decades of her life and remained active as a lecturer and mentor, especially encouraging young women to pursue careers in science.
Hindenburg never visited Eretz Yisrael, nor did he express particular interest in Zionism.... At the same time, there is also no evidence that he was hostile to Zionist aspirations; it simply lay far outside his field of concern, as his worldview was shaped by Germany’s past, not by the national movements of other peoples.
There is a categorical difference between criticizing a government and singling out the world’s only Jewish state for obsessive denunciation while displaying indifference toward, or even apologetics for, far graver abuses elsewhere.
He rarely left the apartment; his only outings were to visit his wife’s gravesite and recite the traditional Kaddish on the anniversary of her death.
When the United States entered World War I, the Army lacked an official cryptographic service, and Riverbank’s Department of Codes and Ciphers, where the Friedmans worked, became the de facto center for American codebreaking.
Perhaps the most enduring aspect of the Shadal’s legacy is his personal integrity.
A democracy that bans some anti-system actors while indulging others ceases to defend principle and begins to enforce raw political preference.
That Congress acted for “the legal representatives of David Valenzin, deceased” in March 1804 indicates both that a formal attempt at redress was recognized and that Valenzin had passed away by that date.
One of Eshkol’s last major political battles was over the question of electoral reform. He favored a mixed system that would preserve proportional representation but introduce regional elements to strengthen the bond between elected officials and local communities, and he believed that Israel’s political fragmentation hindered effective governance.
It is interesting that Duckwitz was required to forward a simple autograph request up the chain of command and to obtain formal approval from the Reich Foreign Minister in Berlin to provide the signature.
Instead of establishing a state commission of inquiry under the existing legal framework, one in which the president of the Supreme Court appoints the commissioners and defines their independence, the government has opted for a politically constituted body.
Rav Nissenbaum’s published oeuvre and editorial work give the best available access to his substantive positions on Jewish law, social practice, and the national question, as he was a prolific writer of derashot (sermons), pamphlets, articles, and at least one substantial autobiography/memoir.
Slattery’s administrative record, like that of many career public servants of his era, was primarily secular and bureaucratic; he was not known as a leader of Jewish communal life nor as a voice on Zionist issues prior to the Slattery Report’s association with his name.
Arendt shrugged off her inaccuracies and errors by arguing that much of the public onslaught was little more than a political campaign to discredit her and that criticism often misrepresented the book.
When scholars consider whether the swastika was a Jewish symbol in the sense that the Star of David or the Menorah is a Jewish emblem, the answer from mainstream academic literature is that there is no evidence that Jewish religious authorities, rabbinic leadership, or organized Jewish communities adopted the swastika as a recognized symbol of Judaism.
Contrary to its name, the Tower has no direct connection to King David, yet its name and its stones tell a complex story of conquest, religion, empire, destruction, and preservation.
There are stories – some plausible, albeit not well documented – that Elvis’s managers advised him, in the racially charged environment of mid-century America, not to emphasize a Jewish heritage because of concerns about the prejudices of Southern audiences.
The lack of previous entanglement with the Mandate or with Jewish–Arab issues was precisely why the British government selected him: it wanted someone perceived as impartial, with no record of favoring Zionist, Arab, or imperial political positions.
Pollard’s recruitment by Israeli handlers and the timeline of his espionage are matters on which documentation is clearer than his motives and consequences.
Levy was both admired and criticized within the American Jewish community. Many Jews saw him as a symbol of Jewish pride and accomplishment, proof that Jews could serve with distinction in the highest ranks of American public life, while others were uncomfortable with his duels, his combative personality, and the controversies that surrounded him.
Elman participated in benefit concerts for Jewish relief organizations during and after the war, raising funds for survivors and displaced persons. In one case, he and his wife assisted in providing affidavits for the Hammberschlag family in Germany and sponsored them (the family arrived in the United States on July 13, 1939).
Sutro opened his own estate to the public and he was heralded as a populist for various astute acts of public generosity, such as opening an aquarium and an elaborate and beautiful, glass-enclosed entertainment complex called the Sutro Baths – which housed seven swimming pools (one freshwater, six saltwater), 517 changing rooms, and could accommodate an unfathomable 7,400 bathers – a museum and an ice-skating rink.
Across a long life that spanned the collapse of the Habsburg world, two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the founding of the State of Israel, Schick combined scientific innovation with leadership in Jewish medical institutions, philanthropic circles, and public-health education aimed at protecting children – an ethic he framed repeatedly with moral language rooted in Jewish concern for life.
Much has been written about the theatrical elements of his “reign” and the popular tolerance that allowed a self-declared emperor to roam a major American city free of serious harassment.
Hirszenberg was born in Łódź, in the Russian partition of Poland, the eldest son of a poor Jewish weaver, who was initially opposed to Samuel's artistic ambitions, which were viewed as incompatible with the values of traditional Jewish life.
The long-term consequences of Carter’s engagement with groups like Hamas were reflected not just in diplomatic circles, but also in the shifting narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within American discourse.
As the Romantic movement reached its crescendo across Europe in the early nineteenth century, few collaborations seemed as unlikely – and as fruitful – as that between Lord Byron, the scion of English nobility and a literary enfant terrible, and Isaac Nathan, an observant Anglo-Jewish composer and musicologist.
Although it has become one of the most familiar and participatory rituals of the High Holiday season that is embedded in contemporary Jewish practice, the extralegal origins of Tashlich and the controversies it once generated have largely been forgotten.
Art historians and commentators, who are fascinated by the question of why Picasso singled out a specifically Jewish figure for The Old Jew, have presented many theories on the subject.
While Jacob Frank emphasized transgression and mystical dialectics between good and evil, Eva’s theological voice, while less documented, seems to have emphasized divine femininity, purity, and mystical royalty.
Despite its unsettled reception, The Man in the Glass Booth was neither suppressed nor forgotten; to the contrary, its notoriety ensured its place in the canon of post-Holocaust drama.
While Zola is celebrated today as a defender of Jewish rights, his fiction, particularly in La Curee, reflects the complexities and contradictions inherent in French attitudes toward Jews in the late 19th century.
Turning himself into a scientific lexicographer, he was determined that each word would have its roots in Biblical sources to the greatest possible extent. However, in many cases, there were no analogs – one estimate is that the Hebrew Bible contains only 6,259 unique words, while modern Hebrew has about 80,000 – so he had to create new words from whole cloth.
While in the United States, Aaronsohn made some important contacts in the American Jewish community, including with some leading philanthropists, who agreed to finance Aaronsohn’s efforts to establish such an institute.
The suggestion that Einstein be invited to assume the presidency of the Jewish State was first publicly disseminated by the evening newspaper Maariv. The idea, which spread quickly, became broadly popular...
The 120 members elected to the Assembly and various invited guests entered the specially-prepared hall, and, when President Weizmann and members of the Cabinet arrived... they were saluted by an honor guard composed of units of the Israeli Army and police force and Hatikvah was played by a combined army-police band.
Five decades before Herzl’s Der Jundenstaat, Montefiore was arguably the first contemporary Zionist.
Upon his return to London, Sir Moses was given a hero’s welcome, including a big ceremony and special synagogue services, and, when he met with Queen Victoria to present her with the firman, she honored him by permitting him to add the Lion of Judah holding a banner bearing the word 'Jerusalem' to his coat of arms.
Recently, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth caused a stir when, pursuant to President Trump’s long overdue purge of content deemed to promote DEI, he absurdly flagged the name Enola Gay for removal, apparently because the name contained the word “gay” (sigh). In fact, the Enola Gay was named after Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of its pilot, Colonel Paul W. Tibbets.
Many of Dylan’s songs are replete with biblical references hearkening back to his Jewish studies in childhood.
Post-World War II Liverpool was generally very antisemitic and Lennon came from an anti-Jewish background. He was known to make impromptu antisemitic comments...
The impressionists differed in their political and social opinions well before the Affair, and their varying attitudes toward France’s Jewish population proved to be one of the most divisive issues.
Breitbart became a great source of hope to all sorts of Jews, ranging from the wholly unaffiliated to Orthodox and Charedi rabbis, who could dream of a future of national empowerment and, ultimately, a Jewish state defended by Jewish strength.
The Boston Globe reported that by the end of November 1967, more than 400,000 members of the Jewish faith are estimated to have observed the commandment to wear Phylacteries (tefillin) at the city’s Western Wall, formerly known as the Wailing Wall.
According to Drage’s biography, Cohen was born in London in 1889 to a family that had just arrived from Poland, but most analysts agree that he was actually born in 1887 to a poor Jewish family in a Radzanów, Poland shtetl shortly before his family fled Eastern European pogroms and emigrated to London.
Most of Miller’s plays were performed in Israel, beginning with Salesman, which was performed at the Habimah National Theatre in Tel Aviv (1951). He visited Israel several times, once attending a presentation of his All My Sons and sitting next to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on his last day in office, May 17, 1977.
Between 1931 and 1934, Chagall worked obsessively on the series The Bible, even going to Amsterdam to carefully study biblical paintings by Rembrandt and El Greco and to examine the extremes in religious painting. He walked the streets of the city's Jewish quarter to again feel the earlier atmosphere.
Upon assuming office as an anti-Communist conservative, he strongly opposed the notion of a P.L.O. state and supported a militarily strong Israel as America's most reliable Middle East ally. Within a few months of his election, however, he had altered his position and began to encourage "moderate" P.L.O. leaders toward possible autonomy and statehood.
Specially produced beautiful and deeply poignant official postcards were issued for all of the pre-Israel Zionist Congresses (all Congresses after 1948 were held in Jerusalem).
Collins was a passionate critic of antisemitism, as to which he advised his troops: “I know that there exists, in some divisions, what your people call antisemitism. It will not be tolerated in my division. Should it crop up, I will hold you personally responsible if I am not made aware of it immediately.
Even standing on their own without musical accompaniment, Shemer’s lyrics were achingly beautiful and highly emotional.
According to most authorities, the family's Judaism was neither religious nor political but, rather, cultural and casual.
It is fascinating to note that, notwithstanding his antisemitism, Sherman was a great admirer of Rose Eytinge (1835-1911), a Jewish-American actress and author who rose to become one of the most popular female stars of the 1860s and 1870s and the first American actress to earn a three-figure salary.
Marceau’s talent with body language and mime movement may have saved his life while fighting with the French resistance. He claimed that he was caught entirely by surprise when he accidentally ran into a unit of German soldiers; quickly improvising, he mimicked an advance guard of a large French force and successfully persuaded the German soldiers to retreat.
So how did the Jews completely transform the change Quadas Kabir story and for what purpose? Who was the nefarious Jew who decided to appropriate glorious Palestinian history?
Although he would not become famous for his Jewish work until some thirty years later, Oppenheim painted one of his most famous works, Return of a Jewish Volunteer from the Wars of Liberation to His Family Still Living in Accordance with Old Customs, in 1833.
In an interview, Tolkien, while not specifically characterizing the Jews as warlike, nonetheless spoke to an explicit connection with biblical characterizations of the Jews, with the biblical narrative describing many wars of conquest, much as Tolkien does in The Return of the King, the third book of his trilogy; in a BBC interview, he referred to the immense warlike capacity of the Jews, which we tend to forget nowadays.
Captured by the Germans after being seriously wounded fighting for France during World War I, he was interned in a POW camp for two years, where he learned English from a fellow prisoner.
The story of the relationship between Hitler and Bernile had been generally unknown until the Alexander Historical Auction House auctioned this photograph to an anonymous, international buyer for a winning bid of $11,520 on November 13, 2018.
The Exodus, an old ferry boat originally called the President Warfield, became a symbol of Aliyah Bet (illegal immigration) – not to be confused with the Second Aliyah – as its famous voyage was designed to call the world's attention to the plight of the hundreds of thousands of Jews left homeless in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
According to this list – again, highly arguable – the most valuable American Jewish signature is Albert Einstein. But who really is the most valuable American signature? It is not George Washington, or Thomas Jefferson, or Abraham Lincoln but, beyond any dispute, it is Button Gwinnett! (Who?)
As one of the very few women in Congress, Florence, never considered herself a feminist and was never seen as a suffragette.
When the stage production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang premiered in London in 2002, it became the most successful stage show ever produced at the London Palladium and it ran for three-and-a-half years, the longest run in that century-old theatre's history.
As the bus approached, Schein fired several shots before his gun jammed and, when Ben-Yosef tossed the grenade, it failed to detonate and the bus, with its 24 Arab passengers, drove away with its passengers unscathed.
Simple in his habits, fearless, and having an unusual capacity for hard work, Rav Hildesheimer joined his great Talmudic learning to his practical administrative ability and, financially independent, he never accepted remuneration for his rabbinical activities.
Take Me Out to the Ball Game brought Von Tilzer great fame and, by the 1920s, he was no longer writing for vaudeville. He was now composing full scores for Broadway and then, after moving to Hollywood in 1930, he wrote songs for motion pictures.
Klemperer was deeply affected by the plight of Jews during the Holocaust and was supportive of the State of Israel and Jewish cultural institutions. His decision to conduct the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra was partly driven by his connection to his Jewish roots and his support for Jewish causes, but he did not actively engage in Zionist political activities.
Although he drew an estimated 50,000 cartoons in his life, relatively few of them were related to the eponymous machines for which he remains best known.
When the British captured Savannah in December 1778, Levi lost almost everything, and after the Americans won their War of Independence and the Patriots regained control of the Georgia government in 1782, they banished him (he relocated to Charleston) and confiscated all his property.
While it is virtually impossible to capture the essence and greatness of the man in a single article, or even in a full-fledged tome, I think that a good glimpse of who he was and what he represented may be gleaned through his correspondence.
The odds against Israel seemed daunting, and many experts believe that it never would have made it through the Ad Hoc Committee (and ultimately, through the General Assembly) but for a passionate two-plus hour speech on May 5, 1949 by Abba Eban, Israel’s designee, to plead its cause.
Presumably with Gelman’s assurance that the Shabbat Congress would be apolitical, the Rebbe did send a lengthy 22 Shevat (February 9), 1942 letter to the Congress, in which he emphasized the dangerous state in which the Jewish people find themselves...
One significant obstacle that the prosecution faced throughout the case was that Beilis was broadly respected, even beloved, by the Gentiles in his neighborhood, some of whom referred to him affectionately as “our Mendel,” and their high regard for him as an honest man was such that many non-Jews either refused to testify against him or even testified in his favor.
After the Affair, the Neturei Karta lost much of its public support and it never again tried to kidnap Jewish children to save them.
Originally designed for about 150 passengers, the Struma was retrofitted to carry almost 800 people, such that its sleeping quarters lacked space for the passengers to even sit up.
A mitzvah at once beautiful, mystical, symbolic, and deeply meaningful, analysis and discussion of its halachic and Kabbalistic essence are far beyond the scope of this article.
In a connection with Rosh Hashana – literally the head of the year – the fish head is a well-known symbol of the Yom Tov. In many Jewish legends, fish are also traditionally a sign of parnassah (prosperity), so the fish symbolizes our prayers that we be at the “head” of our luck and prosperity in the coming year.
Raban (1890-1970), who acquired his reputation through the designs he made for Bezalel, was undoubtedly one of the most important artists in pre-State Eretz Yisrael.
Some critics maintain that the poem was actually a prophetic pre-history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, as Melville brilliantly considers the friction between science and issues of faith and doubt and the interplay between Jewish life and practices in the biblical past and presents contemporary Jewish life in the Ottoman empire in late-nineteenth century Eretz Yisrael.
June 26, 2026 
