My Dying Valentine

A Swiss painting from a century ago helps us reflect on love over time
By Fannie Bialek

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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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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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What Holds America Together?

By Erica Brown
We are currently in the middle of Jewish American Heritage Month. To mark America’s 250th year of independence, President Trump recently declared this coming weekend a national Sabbath—from sundown on May 15 to nightfall on May 16. He is the first American president to make such a move. “This day will recognize the sacred Jewish tradition of setting aside time for rest, reflection, and gratitude to the Almighty ... for our great nation,” stated his proclamation. While not everyone can get behind the president, everyone should be able to get behind the idea of a national Sabbath. Maybe a cleansing…

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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.