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Podcast

Arc: The Podcast

Every other week, Arc Magazine's editor-in-chief, Mark Oppenheimer, is joined by guests to talk religion, politics, et cetera.

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Podcast

Rescued: The Lost Treasures of Klezmer

For decades, klezmer musicians have kept traditional Jewish music alive despite war, genocide, and erasure. They’ve done so by playing a small handful of surviving songs again and again. Many more songs—a trove of tunes with the potential to redefine the genre—have sat just out of reach, in a former Soviet archive. This music was unseen, unheard, unknown. But now, newly rescued, it’s transforming the klezmer world, the people who work in it, and our picture of 20th-century Jewish life in a destabilized Europe. Rescued: The Lost Treasures of Klezmer tells the story of that music.

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Letters to the Editor

“Devout” or “Observant”?

 I really enjoyed your conversation with Molly Worthen. So interesting to hear an intellectual talk about what it's like to become an evangelical Christian. I'm Jewish, live in Berkeley Cal., and attend a Modern Orthodox shul, though I myself am not orthodox. I'm writing to point out something I noticed recently: Christians of faith are described as devout; Jews of faith are described as observant. Here's how I came to this realization.  I belong to a desert hiking group. I…

Why Everyone Hates White Liberals

By Kevin M. Schultz
Although it wasn’t obvious at the time, 1988 would turn out to be a pivotal year in reshaping the conservative assault on white liber­als and eventually pushing it to ridiculous extremes. In that year, President George H.W. Bush’s antiliberal campaign met up with two other forces also using the specter of “1960s liberalism” as constitutive glue: the religious right and the emerging conservative media. Together, these three forces would cement the image of the white liberal in the conser­vative imagination for decades, making the return of the liberal a fruitless crusade. For the religious right, it didn’t take long to…

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What had you thought Opus Dei was?
Gareth Gore: To the public, Opus Dei presents a veneer. It pretends that it is simply a religious organization that wants to help Catholics live out their faith more deeply. But thanks to speaking to people who’d lived inside the organization, and thanks in particular to these secret documents that were smuggled out of the organization, I now understand Opus Dei to be something completely different. Opus Dei for me is a deeply political, a deeply reactionary, organization that aims to infiltrate society at the very highest levels. Infiltrating governments, the judiciary, the upper echelons of the business world. And using its influence in those parts of society to push its reactionary agenda, to turn back the clock on the sexual revolution, contraception, affirmative action.