June 9, 2025

REVIEW: The Jewish Revolt 

Rachel Auerbach was a writer and journalist who worked for the Polish and Yiddish press in pre-war Poland when Emanuel Ringelblum, the chronicler-martyr of the Warsaw Ghetto, drafted her to the Oyneg Shabbos archival group, which heroically documented the Nazi oppression. In his review of Aurbach’s “The Jewish Revolt” David Bernstein profiles Auerbach as an inspiring, mission-driven woman.
June 5, 2025

Unpacking the Iggerot: What’s in a Name?

May observant Jews call their children by non-Jewish names? What even is the proper delineation between a Jewish and a non-Jewish name? Moshe Kurtz explores how R. Moshe Feinstein’s approach to these questions gets at the heart of how he understood the definition of Jewish identity.
June 1, 2025

Shavuot Reading

Aton M. Holzer carefully reads the Shavuot hymn Akdamut and discovers a great deal about the intellectual life, thought, influences, polemics, spoken language, and Jewish life in Ashkenaz before the First Crusade.
May 29, 2025

TRADITION Questions: The Rule of Law

Chaim Strauchler notes popular worries surrounding the rule of law and juxtaposes these concerns to basic themes of Shavuot – z’man matan Torateinu – namely the centrality of law within Jewish thought. How does Judaism preserve the rule of law in the face of forces that attempt to confound it?