The cat’s out the bag after JTA’s end of year fundraising email, but I was away recently staffing a media-focussed Taglit-Birthright Israel group to close out 2012. For a brief moment, it was refreshing to remember what life was like before I became a digital archives junkie 🙂
Below are the 10 most popular Archive Blog stories from calendar year 2012 (based on unique pageviews):
1. Top 10 vintage Rosh Hashanah cards
Celebrate the Jewish New Year with 10 vintage greeting cards for Rosh Hashanah.
2. Dave Brubeck’s Jewish Cantata
Dave Brubeck died one day shy of his 92nd birthday. Though not Jewish, the jazz legend composed a Jewish cantata that inspired at least one Chanukah song.
3. Red, white and moo: red heifers and white buffalo
The killing of a white buffalo — sacred in the Sioux tradition — has Native American leaders upset. Meanwhile, Judaism has sacred cows of a different color.
4. Superbowl halftime show of cultural misappropriation
Ralph Messer’s latest shtick — a veritable Superbowl halftime show of cultural misappropriation — has angered the Atlanta Jewish community.
5. Is Halloween kosher?
For some Jews, Halloween is a reminder of anti-Semitism.
6. 10 must-see retro Israel videos
Watch color video of Tel Aviv in 1939 and other YouTube gems of Israel before Yom Ha’atzmaut.
7. Revenge at Birkenau
Did a French Jewish actress kill a Nazi guard with his own weapon en route to the gas chamber? A recently declassified witness account held by the National Archives and Records Administration offers an account.
8. Irving Berlin’s lover and N-word Mike
Famous Jewish composer Irving Berlin and Roman Catholic socialite Ellin Mackay eloped in 1926. Why did JTA use the n-word when reporting the marriage?
9. On Tisha B’Av, revisiting a U.S. Embassy move to Jerusalem
Contentious debate has surrounded the long standing question as to whether the U.S. will move its embassy from Tel Aviv, Israel’s culture center, to the political hotbed that is Jerusalem.
10. The case against Kol Nidre
On Yom Kippur in 1927, the Jazz Singer put Kol Nidre on film while the Reconstructionist movement removed it from services.
