Important new trends and major challenges have reshaped the field of Jewish education over the past two decades. An overarching development has been families’ insistence on choice as they try to find the schools and programs offering the best fit … [Read More]
Manfred
Interview with Shmuel Trigano The way a country’s population views the Jews largely determines their position in its society. This is often far more important than the Jews’ own behavior. The French perception of the Jews is different from how … [Read More]
Interviews with Wim Kok, Gerrit Zalm, and Els Borst. In the final five years of the previous century, major international attention was focused on the postwar restitution of Holocaust assets. In particular, dormant Swiss bank accounts became a subject of … [Read More]
Reviewed by Manfred Gerstenfeld Ajax, a leading Amsterdam soccer team, was Dutch champion many times and winner of the European Club Championship on several occasions. However, discussion of the soccer club and game in Simon Kuper’s book is, for the … [Read More]
Most Italians think there are many times more Jews in Italy than the thirty-one thousand paying members of the Italian community. Native Italian Jews probably number no more than fifteen thousand. There are sizable communities of Libyan (mainly in Rome) … [Read More]
The challenges confronting American Jewry are multiple. Jewish continuity has many disparate aspects, among which are issues such as Jewish identity, education, marriage, aging, gender relations, the strengthening of communities, leadership, mobility, attitudes toward Israel, philanthropy, outreach, government relations, anti-Semitism … [Read More]
Conservative Jewry faces three major challenges. These concern its message, its quality control, and its structure. The definition of the message has become a priority in part because of the blurring of the boundaries with other movements. Quality control is … [Read More]
Unless there were a compelling reason to do so, one would not usually review a book that devotes only 6 of its 400 pages to a Jewish subject. In this case, the memoirs of the liberal politician Gerrit Zalm, the … [Read More]
The stream of books on Pope Pius XII continues. Dirk Verhofstadt, a Belgian journalist and author, recounts the major issues concerning this pope’s conduct during World War II. He bases his findings on the abundant literature on the subject. This … [Read More]
This small book – an essay of about twenty thousand words – describes a situation in 2009 about which the author says: “As far as I can judge, these were the largest anti-Jewish riots in Norwegian history. Even before and … [Read More]