Text Context

In The Palm Of His Hand

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:37:00 +0000

A look at Abraham Hochman, 19th-century Lower East Side clairvoyant.

Eddy Portnoy

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

One of the items that historians have done a neat job of obscuring as irrelevant to the modern Jewish experience is the role of performance psychics in Jewish life.

Journal Watch

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:33:15 +0000

Jerome A. Chanes

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

“I have always said that the hardest thing to predict is the future.” This, famously attributed to Groucho Marx and others, was in fact a contribution of Nobel-winning biologist Joshua Lederberg. Notwithstanding Lederberg’s wise locution, Journal Watcher’s foray into futurology this month yields some intriguing gleanings.

The View From 18

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:31:15 +0000

What it’s like to be young and Orthodox in 2012.

Daniel Kaplan

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

I am the grandson of Holocaust survivors and the great-grandson of Holocaust victims, and while I don’t dwell on my ancestors’ significant losses, I am all too aware that their tragic experiences are part of my heritage, and it is important to me to make my life meaningful. For the past 18 years, I have lived in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, a predominantly Orthodox neighborhood. I have always attended Orthodox day schools and graduated from SAR High School in Riverdale this past June.

A Disappearing Community

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:27:51 +0000

Although only one Jew remains, Afghanistan was once a peaceful home for Jews.

Sara Y. Aharon

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

‘You’re from Afghanistan? Is that in South America?”

Such was the comment my surprised grandfather received from one curious and well-meaning New Yorker, decades ago. In this post-9/11 world, it’s hard to remember sometimes that Afghanistan did not always dominate the news. Yet Afghanistan, for me, always held a completely different meaning: the country that my grandparents and their baby boy, my father, eagerly and voluntarily left to start over in the new Jewish state during the 1950s. They eventually made their way to New York in 1964.

The Once And Future Past

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:23:29 +0000

Judaism and its messianisms.

Yehuda Kurtzer

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Jews have classically fantasized about the future in two different ways: First, for the saintly righteous, our rich mythical literature describes a “world to come” and its purgatorial corollaries. This is the fantasy of deferred gratification; life may be terrible here — especially for those woebegone righteous people! — but something great awaits on the other side. In the words of one rabbinic teaching, this whole world is but a prozdor, a hallway, through which we are passing en route to the majestic banquet hall on the other side.

A Great, Big, Beautiful Tomorrow

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:21:24 +0000

One day the immense grandeur of the universe will become real and manifest. Where will God fit in?

Barry E. Lichtenberg

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

There’s a great, big, beautiful tomorrow

Shining at the end of every day

There’s a great, big, beautiful tomorrow

And tomorrow’s just a dream away.

Sure, go ahead and laugh. Disney kitsch at its most unctuous. But the lyrics changed my life.

Ground Up

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:18:20 +0000

Diagnosed with cancer, my father decided to have his tongue removed. It’s an extreme treatment, but he’s always known how to make things work out.

Etgar Keret

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

I have a good dad. I’m lucky, I know. Not everyone has a good dad. Last week, I went to the hospital with him for a fairly routine test, and the doctors told us that he was going to die. He has an advanced stage of cancer at the base of his tongue. The kind you don’t recover from. Cancer had visited my father four years earlier. The doctors were optimistic then, and he really did beat it.

The Art Of Personal Transformation

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:15:54 +0000

A Jewish perspective.

Erica Brown

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

In my work as a Jewish adult educator, I constantly speak with people who are poised to change. Often a significant life event prompts them to return to learning — the bar mitzvah of a son, divorce, the death of a parent, the intermarriage of a child — as an anchor at a time of personal upheaval and as an opportunity to grow. Adults negotiate an alarming number of fears, from job loss to rejection in relationships. We seek higher education at a time of fear and disjuncture as a place to find answers to questions that may not be answerable. We seek inspiration.

History After The Witnesses

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:12:35 +0000

When the survivors are gone, Holocaust education will lose a powerful tool.

Deborah E. Lipstadt

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

When I first began teaching the history of the Holocaust in the 1970s I invited a survivor of Auschwitz to speak to my students. It was the first time she had ever spoken publicly about her experiences, and was a profoundly moving moment for her as well as for the students. After that, having witnessed the power of the voice of the person who can speak in the first-person singular, I invited survivors to the class regularly.

Inscribed In Stone

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:10:23 +0000

Of Zechariah and self-fulfilling prophecies.

Stuart Schoffman

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

What you make of the past you make of the future. My father, who came to America as a boy in 1923, was born in a bucolic Latvian village called Ape, also known as Oppenhof. The members of his family who remained in Ape, including his 81-year-old bubbie, Sarah Gittel, were murdered there by Latvian fascist commandos in 1941. In that same year, my father received his doctorate in Jewish history from Dropsie College in Philadelphia. His field of expertise was the Jews of Christian Spain, a story that ended badly in 1492.

Editor’s Note

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:03:50 +0000

Sandee Brawarsky

EDITOR

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Growing up, I didn’t watch “Star Trek,” but I admit that I liked “The Jetsons.” Much of that 1960s vision of the 21st century has come to be. Recently, I asked some college students about what they imagined the future might look like, and they came up with instant travel, new forms of energy, brain cameras to watch our dreams, a cure for cancer. William Gibson, the novelist who coined the term cyberspace, said, “The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed.”

Text Context January 2012

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Our essayists look ahead, guided by Jewish texts, memory and personal experience, from the futurism of the 1964 New York World's Fair to new ideas about messianism, prophesy and the afterlife.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Searching For Moses

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 21:20:26 +0000

A case against leadership by default.

Alfredo Borodowski

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

A review of Jewish leadership programs reveals that a significant portion of their curricula is dedicated to literacy education. Courses such as “basic concepts of Judaism” and “surveys of Jewish history and thought” dominate their educational agenda. Numerous adult education programs, some of them consisting of just a few weeks of learning, add the highly coveted term “leadership” to their name in order to attract participants and donors. In this milieu, it is difficult to distinguish a student of Judaism from a leader in training.

Journal Watch

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 21:16:46 +0000

Jerome A. Chanes

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Plato, in “The Republic,” famously asked, “What distinguishes a leader?” No easy answer to that one. Indeed, philosophers, historians, political scientists, religious thinkers, have long quested those traits that characterize leadership. Is it, in fact, the singular trait of the leader that makes leadership? Or are societal and other situational dynamics more important in shaping leadership?

In Search Of Charisma

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 21:13:00 +0000

The magnetic power of leaders to attract and inspire is hard to define and hard to control.

Joanne Palmer

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Charisma is hard to define, but you know it when you feel it.

Some snapshots. When he was young and we were even younger, my best friend and I went to Lincoln Center to see Tennessee William’s incomprehensible “Camino Real,” starring the still unknown Al Pacino.