The forgotten history of Jews and Muslims needs to be recovered in order to challenge a multitude of dangerous false assumptions that exacerbate the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
Judaism
La Belle Juive
As a keen museumgoer, I have spent countless hours looking at paintings of beautiful Jewish women. Yet until recently I had not realized that the motif of the beautiful Jewess is a recurrent and evolving trope in Western literature and the visual arts.
Choosing Which Language to Live In
“I feel closer to an Arab from Morocco than to a Jew from Brooklyn or Boston.” My mother is a Moroccan Jew, born and bred in Tangier, where she also spent…
Jesus Was Not Christian
Not long after I reviewed Reza Aslan’s work on Jesus, I came across Geza Vermes’s excellent study, Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea (2013), that shows how Jesus’ iconoclastic but…
The Past and Future of Israel
The moment I heard about Ari Shavit’s book, My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, I hastened to get a copy, then another one when I joyfully shared…