Benjamin Weiner

Apr 26, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Benjamin Weiner |Akiva Schick |Yehudah Mirsky |Shai Held

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 560 pp., $35 At five o’clock in the afternoon, in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom finds himself in a Dublin pub, arguing over the meaning of life with a band of incredulous Christians.

Aug 3, 2023 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Benjamin Weiner |Akiva Schick |Michah Gottlieb

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall, and Simon Emanuel Walt Disney Pictures, 154 minutes In 1981, a creative team of three and a half Jews and the maker of Star Wars rendered one of the top action masterpieces in American cinema. Conceived in homage to old B-movie serials, Raiders of the Lost Ark raised this campy genre to sublime new heights.

Jul 9, 2023 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Benjamin Weiner |David Biale

In the mainstream of Jewish collective memory, Jacob Frank was portrayed as an egomaniac- al and depraved ignoramus, a false messiah, and a cynical serial convert—first to Islam, then Christianity. More recently, however, he has become the subject of radical reappraisal, most notably in Nobel Prize–winner Olga Tokarczuk’s novel The Books of Jacob, which depicts Frank as an eighteenth-century forerunner of a multicultural Poland and modern sexual liberation.

Feb 8, 2023 | evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org | Benjamin Weiner

I went to see my mother after Hanukkah, just before the secular New Year, in the place where I grew up, about two hours east of where I live now. Already, when I set out from my rural town to drive the highway to the city where she lives, I could tell there was, yet again, something off about the day. Though I could see frost on the car when I looked out the house window, it had burned off in the rising sun by the time I got outside, and the ground was muddy.

Feb 2, 2023 | evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org | Benjamin Weiner

Toward the end of the book of Esther, we read, “The Jews had light and gladness, happiness and honor” (Esther 8:16), which also came to be a part of our havdalah liturgy, and thus a weekly part of experiencing Jewish time.