For America’s 250th Birthday, Go Back to School

By Mark Oppenheimer

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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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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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Shoot Me a Text

By Michael Erard
Our story begins with “ᴅᴇɴʏ, ᴅᴇꜰᴇɴᴅ, ᴅᴇᴘᴏꜱᴇ,” three words written on the casings of three bullets that Luigi Mangione allegedly fired at UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on Dec. 4, 2024. Before anyone knew the identity of the shooter, these words, all verbs, made sure that the shooting wasn’t mistaken for something random or personal. They conveyed the shooter’s purpose by echoing the title of Jay Feinman’s Delay Deny Defend (2010), a book highly critical of the American health insurance industry. Becoming a meme that’s shown up on graffiti and t-shirts all over the world, well, that was a lucky byproduct. …

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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.