Shai Secunda

1 month ago | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Jenna Weissman Joselit |Akiva Schick |Matthue Roth |Shai Secunda

Purim—the whole shebang, from the ancient story on which the holiday is based to the contemporary ways in which it’s celebrated—always struck me as raucous and overegged. After seeing the Jewish Museum’s latest revelation of an exhibition, The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt, I just might change my mind.

Sep 30, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Shai Secunda |Akiva Schick |Saul Lieberman |Allan Nadler

9 Volumes, Dvir Press, Jewish Theological Seminary Press, and Magnes Press In 1968, a middle-aged Talmud professor named David Weiss Halivni was walking down 116th Street, near the Columbia University campus, when he came across a group of young people caught up in the student revolt. “When they noticed me,” Halivni later recalled, “they stared at me with disdain”:I was the epitome of non-relevance.

Sep 30, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Harvey E. Goldberg |Akiva Schick |Shai Secunda |Matti Friedman

Sometime in the late 1970s, I visited Beit Hatfutsot (Museum of the Diaspora, now called Anu—Museum of the Jewish People) in Tel Aviv. One of the exhibits was a diorama of a family scene from early modern central Europe that dramatized the making of a wimpel, an often lavishly decorated linen sash that was wound around a Sefer Torah several times as a binder. The minhag of that time and place was to make it out of the swaddling cloth used for a baby boy during his circumcision.

Sep 30, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Akiva Schick |Shai Secunda |Abraham Socher

In 2004, a Hasidic man with a long black beard came onto Jimmy Kimmel Live! to sing about praising God in a semi-Jamaican accent. Even now, it’s astonishing to watch Matisyahu—bespectacled, black-hatted, and confident—perform his set on late-night television. His reggae beatboxing, dm-da-da-btt-te-taa-tikt, quickly shifts into the yibbio-bo-bums of a Hasidic niggun before he sings, “No matter where I am, bless me with all your light. . . . Let me stop praise your name. . . .

Jul 15, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Agnieszka Traczewska |Shai Secunda |Joshua Barton |Dara Horn

There are hardly any women in A Vanished World, Roman Vishniac’s classic postwar album of the ill-fated European Jews he photographed in the 1930s. With their nostalgic and elegiac quality, those pictures—more black than white, more religious than secular, and more masculine than feminine—established a way of seeing and photographing Orthodox Jews, especially Hasidim, as a pious, almost premodern, cadre of men and boys.