Arts & Culture
Contemporary Psychedelia: From Transcendence to Immanence
1. Tripping Out and Tuning In What is psychedelia? What is loosely termed 'psychedelic music' has lately undergone a resurgence. Many mainstream musicians such as The Flaming Lips have drawn on its more accessible pop elements, drawing mainly from 60s … Read More
An Encounter with Truth
I was lying with my partner. It was in the afternoon… or was it at the crack of dawn early in the morning. We are starting to rise to the world. Embraced, Entwined. And without warning a radical truth enters … Read More
France’s Jewish Prophets: Alain Finkielkraut, Albert Memmi, and the Looming Crisis of Liberalism
French Jews have long had a privileged relationship with their country’s intellectual life. Sometime they have been an object of intellectual effervescence – as at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, which occasioned the invention of the very term “intellectual” … Read More
Day and Night Dreams
The following are excerpts from Meghan Adler’s book, I Will Tell You How It Was In My Country, which contains visual art, poetry, and passages from the 500-page, unpublished memoir of her grandmother, Celia Adler. . . … Read More
Move Over Starbucks: Israel’s “Upside Down” Coffee Saga
1. The Drug of Choice My name is Esther and I’m a recovering addict. On a good day, I would have only one. On more challenging days, two. And, to my shame and not inconsiderable financial (and calorific) distress, there … Read More
A Sour Pickle The Angel of Death
My father passed away like a Jew: unprepared. He knew where he came from he knew where he’s headed always saw it before him and yet: unprepared. It happened in the month of Shevat at eleven o’clock in the morning. … Read More
The Nazi in the Nursing Home
Reviewed: Michael Lavigne, Not Me (Random House, 2006) What differentiates the Holocaust from the great human crimes of the years since is less the scale of its carnage but the arch-industrial efficiency of its perpetrators. With bloodbaths like the … Read More
The Other Zionist Conspiracy: A History of Christian Zionism
The 2004 U.S. presidential elections left little doubt about the rise of the Christian Right. Polls indicated that “moral values” topped the list of voter concerns, surpassing the economy, the environment, and even the war, and the symbolic campaigns against … Read More