Recently added articles from Midstream:
So whom did Midstream support for president? Financial meltdown; terror in Mumbai; Gaza rockets; changes at Midstream and an appeal to readers.(Editorial)
Jan 01, 2009; ... This editorial is being written in late November, some three weeks after the monumental nation-wide vote that resulted in the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States and Joseph Biden as vice-president. The unprecedented triumph of an African American in the race for the ...
Climbing.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2009; ... <Pre> CLIMBING This morning,in the small basement shul,amidst several Chasidic students lost in prayer,I looked up from my siddurto see a man in workers' clothes climb a ladderand enter ...
Facing tomorrow.(Israel at Sixty)
Jan 01, 2009; ... <Pre>In Xanadu did Kubla KhanA stately pleasure-dome decree. </Pre> Like Coleridge's Kubla Khan, Shimon Peres, the world's only Nobel Laureate who currently doubles as a head of state, did in Jerusalem in May a stately, statehood conference decree. For three days its ...
A Gypsy Boy in Ravensbruck.(Israel at Sixty)(Poem)
Jan 01, 2009; ... <Pre> A GYPSY BOY IN RAVENSBRUCK (For Jan Yoors and Inge Schwank) A Gypsy boy drops his teddy bearand his head is smashed by an SS officer's rifle--an act that vibrates in the atomic historyof the planet the way the solar wind mightif the breath of God blew ...
The poison of history; the doctrines of "jihad" and "stages".(Israel and the Middle East)
Jan 01, 2009; ... The question of achieving a genuine and permanent peace between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs has become a central Middle East preoccupation. During the Annapolis conference of November 2007, weak Israeli and Palestinian governments pledged to work out a final peace agreement by the end ...
Morning Prayer.(Israel and the Middle East)(Poem)
Jan 01, 2009; ... <Pre> MORNING PRAYER O gather the fringes of my lifeFrom the four corners of my room,And gather the rooms of my mindAnd make them once more a home. Round my shoulders let my talit,This prayer shawl, calm my heart,So that its black-striped wool...
Joseph Sinzheim, president of Napoleon's Sanhedrin and the first chief rabbi of France.(Jewish History)
Jan 01, 2009; ... The recent celebrations of the bicentennial of the establishment of Napoleon's Sanhedrin (1806-1807) and the Central Consistory of the Jews of France (Consistoire Central des Israelites de France) (1808) warrant revisiting the personality of its president, Rabbi David Joseph Sinzheim ...
Abraham Geiger and Abraham Isaac Kook: Messianism's return to history.(Jewish History)
Jan 01, 2009; ... Abraham Geiger and Abraham Isaac Kook seem to share little in common but their first names and the fact that both men were leading rabbis and theologians in their respective movements. Geiger, the leading Reform theologian in the 19th century, was a master of the rational, scientific study ...
Rabbi Dr. Emanuel Rackman (1910-2008), z"l.(In Memoriam)
Jan 01, 2009; ... The first Midstream issue that I worked on as a newly hired Editorial Consultant appeared in February/March 1990. It included an incisive article by Emanuel Rackman, co-authored with a young rabbi/lawyer named Michael Broyde. Its subtitle was "Halacha and the State of Israel," and it ...
Guidelines for writers as of January 2009.(In Memoriam / Guidelines)
Jan 01, 2009 ... Midstream is now a quarterly publication. We continue to welcome submission of manuscripts that deal with Jewish life and culture worldwide, past and present, with particular emphasis on current Jewish affairs, political, social, and cultural, in America and in Israel. We hope to continue ...
Gunter Grass's Mea Culpa.(Shoah: Arts & Letters)
Jan 01, 2009; ... In his recently published autobiography, Peeling the Onion, (2006) Nobel prize winning novelist, Gunter Grass, revealed that at the tender age of sixteen he had enlisted in the infamous Waffen SS. One might suppose that this youthful transgression was effectively canceled by ...
"Love your fellow as yourself".(Midrash)
Jan 01, 2009; ... If one thousand or one million people, Jews and non-Jews in the United States, were asked what is the most famous and most important line in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, I think the answer of most persons would be words from Leviticus 19:18. The words are, "But love your neighbor ...
A remarkable first novel: who deserves to be the New Rosh Yeshiva?
Jan 01, 2009; ... The Search Committee: A Novel, by Marc Angel. Jerusalem and New York: Urim Fiction, 2008. 155 pp. $19.95. Rabbi Emeritus Marc Angel of Congregation Shearith Israel, who has written over twenty-five books on Sephardic intellectual traditions and Jewish philosophy, has written a ...
"The Catholic Church and the Jewish People".
Jan 01, 2009; ... The Catholic Church and the Jewish People, edited by Philip A. Cunningham, Norbert J. Hofmann and Joseph Sievers. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. 271 pp. $50. The Second Vatican Council that lasted from 1962 to 1965 and the revolutionary document it approved, known as ...
Look away a little bit.
Jan 01, 2009; ... Trudging alongside my grandmother through the sweltering sweets of her Brooklyn neighborhood, I couldn't believe that she wasn't finished shopping yet. For what seemed like hours, she had dragged me from one fruit and vegetable vendor to another, squeezing the merchandise with the same ...
Candide's Naysayer in lively modern dress.
Jan 01, 2009; ... The Blessed Human Race: Essays on Reconsideration. By George Jochnowitz. Hamilton Books (4501 Forbes Boulevard #200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, 2007), 123 Pages. There is a wonderful scene in chapter 25 of Voltaire's Candide in which the latter, along with a companion, Martin, ...
Tonight, You Sleep.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2009; ... <Pre> TONIGHT, YOU SLEEP Was it the flick of the dice or a magician's trick?Was it the night the glass shatteredOr the start of the plagues from Moses' dreams? You would never know,So inept were your powers of divinationTo discern the slightest formulations ...
Politics versus religion.
Jan 01, 2009; ... Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics from the Great War to the War on Terror, Michael Burleigh, HarperCollins, 2007, 557 pp., $27.95 In April 2007 the Vatican ambassador to Israel announced that he would skip the official Holocaust Day ceremony at a national museum ...
Jewish American immigrant fiction continued: the contemporary Russian story.
Jan 01, 2009; ... The Last Chicken in America: A Novel in Stories, By Ellen Litman, New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2007 Irving Howe's famous observation that the power of Jewish American fiction would wane as the generation shaped by immigration fell silent seems less true than when it appeared in ...
Shabbat Soccer.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2009; ... <Pre> SHABBAT SOCCER I hear the rain on the roof aboveand think,Today my daughter will be in shulMy heart is lightBut she calls from her mother's ...