June 20, 2023
Israeli illustrator Shay Charka explains how Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” liberated Jewish culture by appropriating anti-Semitic stereotypes: “Spiegelman’s most significant contribution to the rehabilitation of the Jewish spirit after millennia of persecution culminating in the Holocaust is specifically through his depictions of Jews as mice.” While a Missouri School Board debates banning "Maus," we revisit this post which originally appeared in TraditionOnline's "The BEST" series.
November 9, 2022
As we prepare to read the twinned stories of the banishment of Ishmael and the binding of Isaac we revisit this installment from our The BEST series, in which our editor Jeffrey Saks offered a reading of Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Gilead." In this work about fathers and sons, and our Father in heaven and His children, Robinson (a devout Christian) puts into the mouth of her protagonist an extended homily on the Patriarch Abraham and his sons.
October 27, 2022
Postmodernism, deconstruction, and midrashic readings help us make sense of the enigmatic tale of the Tower of Babel – read in synagogues this Shabbat. Miriam Feldmann Kaye marshals the thought of Jacques Derrida and Jonathan Sacks to construct meaning out of the confusion wrought through the bilbul at Bavel.
September 29, 2022
Chaim Strauchler looks to Matthew Arnold and Rav Kook for the ultimate and integrated whole toward which “the best that has been thought and said” might lead—namely one’s best self. As” The BEST” column heads off for a hiatus, Strauchler reflects on what we have been doing in 150 installments and what we hope you’ve gained from the effort.