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JTA
EST 1917

At the start of the Bible, everyone on Earth speaks the same language. This all changes when a group of people decides to build a tower–the Tower of Babel–up to the heavens (Genesis 11). In retrospect, this was not the most strategic move. God is unhappy with the Tower, and curses the builders by giving them all different languages and scattering […]

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The Shema is the most important six-word liturgical formula in Judaism–“Hear o Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One,” runs the usual English translation. But when translating into American Sign Language, one encounters a number of idiosyncratic disconnects. For one thing, the first word–hear. Deaf people don’t “hear” things in the way the Hebrew word indicates. So what does Shema, the […]

Scotch and herring is the snack of Jewish royalty–the old men at the back of the synagogue on Saturday morning, that is. From this honored tradition, the “Scotch and Herring Mysteries“–a new series of short crime novels by David Y.B. Kaufmann–takes its name. The first short novel, Rampage on Rogers Avenue, opens with a terse conversation between two Brooklyn policemen. A […]

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