Israeli Culture

Tehila Wenger offers a short story on loss, eternity, and olive trees .

Organizations advocating for Jewish renewal in Israel have become increasingly popular in the last decade, seeking to transcend the religious-secular divide and articulate a vision of Jewish civilization as a shared identity. David Sperber explores the ways that these organizations effectively seek to recreate models that have already long existed in non-Orthodox denominations, but to wrap them in the idioms and culture of Orthodoxy. He argues that failure to recognize the non-Orthodox contributions is unjustified and hopes that Israeli society can grow to "recognize renewal wherever it has taken root."

In a continuing series on great, modern Israeli thinkers, Joe Wolfson explores the powerful themes in a novel by Rav Haim Sabato.

Wendy Zierler interprets a 2015 poem by the late Haim Gouri, reflecting on the challenges of aging, and on the complex and often mournful relationship between the Jewish people, their history, and their literature.

In honor of his tenth yahrtzheit, art historian Jackie Frankel Yaakov explores the art of Jewish Israeli artist Edwin Salomon (1935-2014). She argues that he was able to embrace his own expressionistic, Surrealism-evoking style when these approaches were marginalized in the Israeli art, shedding light on the ways he processed his experiences in the Holocaust and as a new immigrant to Israel.

  Yael Unterman   I dedicate this essay to my friend Dr. Tsippi Kauffman z”l, who passed away in the course of its writing. A wonderful educator,...

Author Risa Miller reviews Beth Kissileff's debut novel, Questioning Return.

Have you seen the latest teen magazine for religious Zionist women? Yoel Finkelman has, and he has some thoughts.

Leslie Ginsparg Klein's reflections on Shimon Peres, Zionism, and the importance of nuance.

Yael Unterman            Humor me as I begin with a question: Off the cuff, what’s your educated guess as to how...