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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…

Some of the News That’s Fit to Print

By Alexander Nazaryan
Adam Valen Levinson yearned to learn Arabic. He did and wrote about it in The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah: Fear and Love in the Modern Middle East. His publisher, W.W. Norton, successfully placed an excerpt in Literary Hub, the website widely known as LitHub. The excerpt ran on Dec. 7, 2017. It begins with Levinson—who died last November, seemingly a suicide— describing how he wanted to learn Arabic after the 9/11 terrorist attack, which was perpetrated by fundamentalists tied to the extremist group Al Qaeda.  “By learning the primary language of this region, some of us thought, we might be…

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Blake Smith: How does Christianity help us mediate, as you suggest, between the worst sort of collectivism and the worst sort of individualism? Or perhaps mediate is the wrong word, since these two “worsts” do so often go together! Let’s say, transcend?
Julius Krein: I don’t think it’s anything more complicated than Christianity’s consciousness of the division between the City of God and the City of Man, “render unto Caesar,” and so on. But this distinguishes Christianity from the other monotheistic religions as well as ancient paganism and, I would argue, “rational” philosophy. This distance allows for another dimension or perspective from which to approach the relationship between the individual and the collective.