Category: Other

The reunion of Yosef and his brother, Binyamin, and the reunion with Yakov, were very emotional meetings.

Our commentators describe how Yosef cried on the shoulders of Binyamin, and Binyamin cried on his shoulders. They were able to see into…

Palmer Luckey is often celebrated as a Silicon Valley wunderkind: a teenage inventor who built a virtual reality headset in his parents’ garage, sold Oculus to Facebook for billions, and later re-emerged as a defense-tech entrepreneur…

Metastability, nucleation, and the logic of tipping points

Phase-transition language can illuminate not only Joseph’s story but also the history of humanity.

To be clear, this is a metaphor, not a reduction. Human history is not governed…

While the world’s attention was fixed on the holiday lull, a profound and irreversible shift in the balance of power occurred on the southern shores of the Mediterranean. It was a tale of two capitals moving in opposite directions through…

Q: Why do Jews write from right to left?
Hebrew is written from right to left because the right side is considered the spiritual side or “the right one,” while the left is not. There is a spiritual root in nature, the quality of giving,…

In this episode and the following one, meetings with remarkable Elijahs.

The Eternal Jew’s Tale
A Pesakh Montage, The Crystal Haggadah
Midrashbase

Khasidic Seder Midrashim, Kotsk, 1838 CE; part 1

… But once, with Yitzkhak Meir, his friend,…

The other week, after attending a Hanukkah event at a local Chabad synagogue, my family and I took an Uber back to our hotel. Our driver was an older woman who, upon learning where we had been, shared that she too was Jewish—but hadn’t…

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Something rubs me the wrong way when I hear yet another well-meaning government official or other representative talk about how they support yet another Holocaust museum or memorial. How they really regret what the…

How a 19th-century phantom planet explains a 21st-century antisemitic reflex. Inspired by The Arc of a Covenant by Walter Russell Mead

In the mid-1800s, astronomers faced a stubborn puzzle: Mercury’s orbit didn’t behave exactly as…

“For  Islam to recover, it must undergo a “war of interpretations” to neutralize literalist readings and move toward a “post-Islamic, post-religious” space similar to the historical trajectories of Christianity…