It’s no secret: as a people, we wander. Lawrence Baron discusses the various migrations of Jews in world history and how global cinema has portrayed these movements. Author of “The Wandering View: Modern Jewish Experiences in World Cinema and Projecting the Holocaust Into the Present,” Baron knows a thing or two about Jews and movies.
The study of history never lends itself to a single unambiguous view of the past. For history is, as the British scholar E.H. Carr observed in his famous 1961 book “What is History?” “a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the past and the present.”
Franz Kafka has entered our language as an adjective — “Kafkaesque” is applied nowadays to almost anything that strikes us as senseless or surreal — but the man himself remains obscure. Saul Friedlander’s short biography in Yale’s Jewish Lives series, “Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt” (Yale University Press, $25.00), offers an intriguing effort to fill in the blanks of a famous but little-understood author.
Quebec’s government introduced its much-discussed Charter of Quebec Values, which would ban “overt and conspicuous” religious symbols worn by government employees.
A minor earthquake rocked Jerusalem and the Dead Sea.
Palestinians threw rocks at Jewish worshippers and Israeli security forces at Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus.
Vladimir Putin warned of a possible attack on Israel as the United States considers whether to strike Syria.
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