Observation ·
How the Jews Remain an Eternal People
By Dr. Ruth WisseWe Jews are the blue and white in the red, white, and blue.

Dr. Ruth R. Wisse is professor emerita of Yiddish and comparative literatures at Harvard and a distinguished senior fellow at Tikvah. Her memoir Free as a Jew: a Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation, chapters of which appeared in Mosaic in somewhat different form, is out from Wicked Son Press.
Observation ·
We Jews are the blue and white in the red, white, and blue.
Monthly Essay ·
Abraham Cahan was one of America's first great Jewish newspapermen, and set an example of independent thinking that the nation could sorely use today.
Observation ·
Featuring prime ministers, kidnappings, popes, silences, exiled shadows, portraits, intellectual origins, the best minds, and more.
Observation ·
Lacking freedom, Jews once developed an ethic of martyrdom. Now, they don’t need martyrs, they need to stand and fight.
Monthly Essay ·
The great Yiddish writer envisioned an unbroken transmission of Jewishness through the generations, from biblical prophets to talmudic sages to literary giants like Heine—and himself.
Observation ·
Will the administration’s new strategy to counter anti-Semitism camouflage its own inaction?
Monthly Essay ·
The novelist and rabbi Haim Sabato infuses tradition into fiction as well as any of the Yiddish greats. The difference? His work is unencumbered by modern angst.
Observation ·
Why haven't more American Jews joined the many Asian-American students and their parents protesting a policy reminiscent of the 1920s?
Observation ·
Focusing on America’s failures to save more Jews in the Holocaust unintentionally strengthens the forces that would threaten Jews today. Here's how.
Observation ·
The direct target of anti-Jewish politics may be the Jews, but the more consequential damage is to the land of Lincoln. What can Jews do to help?
Observation ·
Smiling at my visible distress, my neighbor said he was surprised: did I really not know what was going on to Jews around us? But it's our responsibility to stay.
Observation ·
That America still so passionately debates abortion marks the difference between the stagnation of Europe and the hopeful civilization of the United States.
Observation ·
The middle of the 20th century inaugurated a time when American Jewish sons stopped being able to imagine themselves as Jewish fathers—and we're still living in it.
Observation ·
The characters in her new story collection are fully formed creatures of that transitional 20th-century moment between European Jewish survivors and American forgetters.
Observation ·
The children of Jewish Communists needed a therapeutic process to work through the effects of growing up in a political cult. They didn't get it.
Observation ·
Five of our writers pick several favorites each, featuring a duke's children, Jewish treasures, zealots and emancipators, revolts, dual allegiances, spies, and more.
Observation ·
Jews can do their fellow citizens a favor by identifying the sources of cultural poison before the toxicity turns fatal. Hardly anybody is doing it better than these two.
Observation ·
Before Dara Horn's People Love Dead Jews, and before Bari Weiss's "Everybody Hates the Jews," there was Cynthia Ozick's still powerful and urgent essay in Esquire .
Observation ·
S. Ansky's radical yeshiva boys used to seem unreal. But observing today's political scene has taught me to understand them.
Observation ·
Parts of the Jewish people stand up to the barrage of anti-Semitism, but others do not. Those others are part of the threat.
Observation ·
Which of the recent samples of anti-Semitism—on the street, on campus, in Congress, or in the clergy—is the greatest threat to America and the Jews?
Observation ·
"The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus and "The Silver Platter" by Natan Alterman distill, reinforce, and hallow what makes each nation distinctive.
Observation ·
The latest drama in the field of Jewish studies has turned into a campaign to reframe the perpetuation of Jewishness as a dystopian project of enforced reproduction.
Observation ·
Back in my teens, when I began reading and thinking about Zionism, I thought the founder of the movement was a snob. I was dead wrong.
Observation ·
Five more of our regular writers pick several favorites each, featuring what Jews are for, magicians, assassins, call signs, chaos, separated siblings, and more.
Observation ·
Some of Mosaic' s regular writers reflect on Neal Kozodoy and his accomplishments.
Observation ·
Six more Mosaic writers share their favorites, featuring shadow strikes, orchards, gleanings, constitutional evolutions and revolutions, serotonin, odd women, and more.
Monthly Essay ·
The Jewish writer who became America’s most decorated novelist spent his early years prodding the nation’s soul. Then, sensing danger to it, he took up the role of guardian.
Observation ·
What I witnessed in my two decades of teaching at Harvard.
Observation ·
At arguably the moment of Harvard's greatest involvement with Jews and Judaism, new movements in (anti-)intellectual thought started to creep in, too.
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