Shalom Carmy

Teshuva means return, and return in the ­Hebrew Bible and the Jewish legal tradition means return to God. It is the word for repentance. Some prominent modern Jewish thinkers have used the term teshuva to refer to the individual or the community’s return to itself. The list . . . . Continue Reading »

Crippled by a stroke, my aunt Miriam spent the last seventeen years of her life in a succession of nursing homes. Once, she had been the skilled seamstress who for years took pride in sewing much of the female apparel in our family, and who sought out opportunities to cook and bake for all of us. . . . . Continue Reading »

On the American “Jewish street” of the mid-1960s, you did not need to have read her work to have an opinion about Hannah Arendt. The German Jewish émigré to the United States had written a famous book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, which showed that anti-Semitism was at the core of the . . . . Continue Reading »

Proportional representation used to be blamed for the collapse of the Weimar Republic: Too much fragmentation crippled effective majority government. Israel adopted proportional representation in 1948, but in order to avoid what happened in Germany, the Israelis set a 1 percent threshold for a party . . . . Continue Reading »

We often blame the unfavorable treatment of traditional religion in contemporary art on animus or ignorance. Sometimes that’s an accurate assessment. But we underestimate how devilishly difficult it is to depict devout, God-centered characters convincingly, without making them plastic saints or . . . . Continue Reading »

The utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham defines the good as the greatest happiness of the greatest number. More than two hundred years after Bentham, it remains, with myriad modifications, a highly influential theory of the good life among academics and policy makers. One great advantage of . . . . Continue Reading »

Our founding fathers are rarely praised as fountains of mirth. As a child, I read and reread The Wit and Wisdom of Abraham Lincoln until the book disintegrated. Can you imagine such a volume for Washington or any of his confreres? Benjamin Franklin is the exception. He is remembered as the . . . . Continue Reading »

I first read Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man less than twenty years after its publication. It was already a classic among readers who cherished the few works of Jewish thought written in artful, eloquent English for a literate audience. Heschel summoned . . . . Continue Reading »

Young Rabbi Binder has opened the floor for a “free discussion” period at the afternoon Hebrew school housed in the synagogue, where the minimal Jewish education he dispenses to postwar Jewish boys is a prerequisite for their bar mitzvah ritual. As usual, most of the kids are indifferent, even . . . . Continue Reading »

One evening in the late 1960s, the students gathered in Yeshiva University’s major study hall to learn Talmud were treated instead to a speech by Rabbi Aharon ­Lichtenstein, the young director of the advanced graduate rabbinic program. The topic was the struggle of Soviet Jews to emigrate. Unlike . . . . Continue Reading »