Henry Sapoznik, director of the Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture at the University of Wisconsin, has taken me to task for writing in my July 27 column that the song “Yoshke Fort Avek” was written by the Yiddish performer Aaron Lebedeff during the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War. Lebedeff, Mr. Sapoznik writes, had nothing to do with…
It’s tempting to read literal crucifixion imagery into Barnett Newman’s 14-canvas series, “The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani.” The portrait-oriented, black-and-white paintings and their bold stripes initially appear to be fully vertical in their thrusts, like crosses without horizontal shafts. But upon closer inspection, the vertical stripes, or “zips,” as Newman called them, which…
“The Jesus Discovery: The Resurrection Tomb that Reveals the Birth of Christianity” By James D. Tabor and Simcha Jacobovici Simon & Schuster, 272 pages, $27.95 In 1835, David Strauss published “The Life of Jesus Critically Examined,” which debunked the miraculous elements of the New Testament and inaugurated the modern recovery of the “real Jesus.” Strauss…
Some of you may have heard or read in recent days about the “Patio Tomb” in Jerusalem’s southern neighborhood of Talpiot, a Second-Temple-period cave, now situated beneath an apartment building, in which a team of archaeologists sponsored by the University of North Carolina claims to have found the earliest known Christian burial site — indeed,…
Sometime in the mid-to-late 1640s or early 1650s, a young Jewish man — probably of Spanish-Portuguese descent — seems to have taken what would likely have been a short walk from his home in Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter to Jodenbreestraat (“Jewish Broad Street”) 4, where Rembrandt van Rijn lived. Inside the three-story home, which Rembrandt purchased…
A month after his first visit to Israel, Justin Bieber has gotten a Hebrew tattoo. The 17-year-old pop star showed off the new ink during a visit to Hawaii with his girlfriend this week. (Because that’s what normal 17-year-olds do: get tattoos and go to Hawaii with their girlfriends.) The letters spell out “Yeshua,” or…
Michael David Lukas’s first book, “The Oracle of Stamboul,” is now available. His blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog series. For more information on the series, please visit: I’ve been thinking a lot these past few months about…
It seems obvious to note that Jesus — like Don Juan, Oedipus and Count Dracula — has a cultural life having little to do with his original narrative. Although it is now widely believed that he did exist, Jesus is so buried in centuries of Christian tradition that in 1906 Albert Schweitzer declared the search…
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