Jerusalem
Story Stream
Oberammergau’s Passion Play Returns September 13, 2022
The Oberammergau Passion Play is an extraordinary spectacle. This vernacular retelling of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem, his trial and crucifixion is the world’s longest-running and largest amateur production, and a controversial barometer of Jewish-C...
A.B. Yehoshua’s Culture War September 09, 2022
On the evening of May 18th, the writer A.B. Yehoshua—“Bulli” to his many friends—climbed onto a Jerusalem stage, heavy on his walker, acknowledging the cheers of an audience that had come out to pay tribute to his work. Three younger writers had just...
The Floating Space City of the Jews May 27, 2022
There are many hundreds of small textual differences between the Jewish and Samaritan Pentateuchs, the most important of them being a long addition in Exodus 20:17 mentioning Mount Gerizim, and the wording in Deuteronomy 27:2-8 (God had already chose...
‘Under Jerusalem’: Layers of History and Faith December 20, 2021
In “Civilization and Its Discontents,” Freud compared memory and its recovery to the archaeology of Rome. The visitor cannot see the earlier layers of civilization, but the guidebook says where they once were. This allows us to look at the Colosseum ...
Becoming a Religion of the Book December 20, 2021
The oldest scriptures that eventually became the Bible were created within an environment where no appreciable religious function was assigned to texts. The stories, proverbs, songs, and prayers dating from the ninth and eighth centuries bc that rese...
