-Joseph Epstein provides a comprehensive and generally favorable review of the PBS documentary “The Jewish Americans.� (National Endowment for the Humanities)
-The editor of a Jewish community monthly magazine in Vienna “who brought the wrath of Austria’s right-wing forces upon himself after accusing an Austrian professor of defaming Jews� is acquitted of causing the professor’s suicide. (Baltimore Jewish Times)
–An appreciation of recently deceased Russian historian Rashid Kaplanov, who explored subjects as diverse as the Karaites of the Black Sea region, the Karaims, a sect of Jewish origin in Lithuania, and “the conversion to the Russian Orthodox church of Sephardic Jews in 18th-century Moscowâ€? and “the intellectual resurgence of Jewish culture among the remnants of communities almost destroyed by the Nazis and the Communists.â€? (The Times Online)
-Jay Michaelson on Psychedelics and the Future of Spirituality. (Jewcy)
–The issue of mesira, or informing, “has prompted a round of collective soul-searching in segments of Los Angeles’ Jewish community.â€? (Forward)
-And Allan Nadler takes a deep look at the “violent hatred, especially within Hasidic culture, for informants.� (Forward)
Hasidic
Pronounced: khah-SID-ik, Origin: Hebrew, a stream within ultra-Orthodox Judaism that grew out of an 18th-century mystical revival movement.
Sephardic
Pronounced: seh-FAR-dik, Origin: Hebrew, describing Jews descending from the Jews of Spain.
