Jewish Thought and History

Gavriel Lakser offers a new approach to the problem of evil based on the beginning of Genesis.

Ariel Evan Mayse considers the neo-Hasidic approaches of Shlomo Carlebach and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.

Can we imagine a world in which the Exodus never occurred? David Curwin suggests that this - as well as a broader dispute about the relationship between Torah and history - is subject to a dispute between The Rav, R. Joseph Dov he-Levi, and his namesake, the Beit ha-Levi.

Did the Founding Fathers study Kabbalah? Yisroel Ben-Porat reviews Brian Ogren’s new book Kabbalah and the Founding of America.

Did Rabbeinu Bahya mention a lightning rod centuries before it was discovered? Yaakov Taubes takes us on a journey through science, magic, and religion to help explain this medieval commentator’s cryptic comment about the Tower of Babel.

For Parshat Naso, Lehrhaus editor Yosef Lindell compares three twentieth-century rereadings of the Sotah ritual that make the passage more palatable to modern audiences.

What sort of powers did Hazal have in the first century? Ari Lamm wonders.

Jewishness, antisemitism, popular culture and Russian television in the postwar era? Historian Maya Balakirsky Katz explains.

In response to Gil Perl's Postmodern Orthodoxy, Gidon Rothstein asks for another look at Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein and the limits of pluralism and what we consider "truth."

Stuart Halpern explains how, when faced with uncertainty, danger, and personal and communal hardships, Americans have turned to the story of the Exodus for inspiration.