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Articles by Menachem Kellner
Enlisting Orthodoxy
This past Sunday, Israel’s defense ministry delivered one thousand draft notices to Haredi men, with two thousand more to follow soon. The ministry is carrying out the attorney general’s interpretation of the High Court ruling against army exemptions for Haredi yeshiva students, who numbered some 66,000 in 2023. Haredi leaders panned the ruling. The former Sephardi chief rabbi instructed students to disobey their draft orders.
Be Careful What You Wish For
Roughly half a century ago, when I began my career in the field of Jewish studies, the Association for Jewish studies was in its infancy, and its membership could easily fit into the Harvard Faculty Club, where many of its early meetings were held. In my own subfield, medieval Jewish philosophy, and in my generation, I was one of the few practitioners who was neither an ordained rabbi nor clearly identified with one of the then-dominant streams of American Judaism.
Rabbenu Tam and the Silver Talons
The house of Rabbi Ishmael taught that when the Israelites left Egypt they were comparable to a dove that fled from a hawk and entered a small hole in a rock and found a snake’s nest. She could not enter any further because the snake was there, and she could not turn around for the hawk was waiting outside. What did the dove do? She began crying out and flapping her wings so that the owner of her birdhouse would come and rescue her.
A Different View of Haifa
Israel’s Haifa port. Credit: Zvi Roger – Haifa Municipality. In a May 25 guest essay, “The Myth of Coexistence in Israel,” Diana Buttu writes of Haifa, my hometown. Self-identified as a Palestinian citizen of Israel, she is resolutely focused on the glass half-empty. Her op-ed was illustrated with maps presenting a false, agenda-driven picture of the geography of the holy land fought over by Israelis and Arabs for over a century.
Why Maimonides Matters
“From Moses to Moses, none arose like Moses.” This popular expression, engraved on what is popularly though to be Maimonides’ tomb in northern Israel, says much about the medieval physician, philosopher and halachist’s status in Jewish circles. With the possible exception of Rabbi Judah the Prince, the editor of the Mishnah, it is hard to think of any single individual since the first Moses whose absence would be felt as dramatically today.
Tablet Magazine
What is Yom Kippur? Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is when Jews fast and ask forgiveness for the sins they committed in the past year and for ones they’ll inadvertently commit in the new year to come. When is Yom Kippur? In 2021, Yom Kippur begins at sundown on Wednesday, September 15, ending at sundown on Thursday, September 16. What’s it all about? Yom Kippur is the most awesome of all Jewish holidays.
Vive la Differénce! A Rejoinder to Joshua Holo
In his response to my essay, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion’s Dean Joshua Holo had the difficult task of distancing his institution and the Reform movement from Michael Chabon’s now-infamous commencement address calling for the dissolution of all Jewish particularism while at the same time justifying the choice of Chabon as commencement speaker. It is not a task I envy him, and I can say that he has responded with erudition and grace.
The Alt-Right and the Not-Quite Intellectuals
The entire universe has agreed that The New York Times did a terrible thing a few days ago in running Richard Fausset’s portrait of a young Nazi from the Ohio suburbs named Tony Hovater, but I have to confess that, regardless of the universe and its opinions, I learned something from the piece. Hovater is a founder of the Traditionalist Worker Party, which rioted at Charlottesville. From Fausset’s piece and the accompanying photography, I learned that he has a bookcase.
Meme Wars: Is It OK To Be White?
Is it OK to be white? The question is at once disingenuous, facetious, satirical, and self-parodic. It is also one of the consequential questions being posed in earnest by the moral and political vanguards of our time. The question invites the typical reader to resist its implications—to deny that the question is one that anyone would think to ask, or that people are asking. But people have thought to ask it, they are asking it.
Title Page - Moses the Man - Master of the Prophets - Editor Moshe Hallamish Hannah Kasher Hanoch Ben-Pazi - Bar-Ilan University Press
Description The figure of Moses, his leadership and his history, are recorded in the Torah, and he emerges as an impressive personality: lawmaker, prophet, leader and man. Ahad Ha`am remarked that the figure of Moses is a subject for the learned, but not for them only, as ``the spark of Moses lights up every generation.`` His personality, his prophesy and his philosophy stand at the center of the essence of Jewish existence at all levels.
The Mystery of Trump, Partially Explained
The New York Times published an article last week by Nicholas Confessore and Nick Corasaniti which, without meaning to do so, shed a light on the dark mystery of the Trump campaign—namely, how did everyone fail to see it coming? The journalists and political analysts, myself included—how did they, and I, fail to see that Trump’s campaign was going to be strong and viable? Fail to see that America’s political tradition has undergone a rupture?
The Century-Old Science Fiction Story That Predicted Our Current Cultural Malaise
Sometimes, when the particular moment in time into which you happened to have been born seems dumb beyond relief, time travel is the only option. Watching what we understand to be our civilization tumbling into a bottomless pit of despair, we may be forgiven for wondering if this is just a passing phase and if the future, bless it, is likely to be any better. The answer, of course, is no.
Tradition, Creativity, and Cognitive Dissonance
Just over a year ago in these pages, I wrote a requiem for Conservative Judaism. In the aftermath of the controversy stirred up by that essay, I have continued to think about what went wrong with the movement. At the very same time, I have also been writing a short history of Israel and about the ways in which Zionist ideas did—and did not—come to fruition in the Jewish state. Perhaps inevitably, the two projects have begun to inform one another.
God and Idolatry
Reading Saving God in shul, I was asked by the person sitting next to me what it was about. He may have been struck by the cover illustration, which reproduces a painting from the cathedral in Toledo, Spain, called The Despoilation of Christ.
When Eve Ate the Etrog: A Passage from Tsena-Urena
The commandment to recite the blessing over the lulav and the etrog on Sukkot can only be fulfilled with a fully intact fruit. If the etrog’s stem is broken off or missing, it is unfit for ritual use. But as soon as the holiday is over, the etrog is superfluous. It was once the custom for a pregnant woman to bite off the tip of the etrog after services on Hoshanah Rabbah. This strange action is an outgrowth of an early modern Ashkenazic tradition about the pangs of childbirth.
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