A Tribute to Workers, Written in Chalk 

By Marjorie Ingall

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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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Identity as Burden, Identity as Grace

By Blake Smith
One of the central tensions of American life thrums in the double meaning of “identity.” On the one hand, the word refers to a unique, irreplaceable, individual self, which we are summoned constantly to reveal and cherish. On the other, “identity” refers to the demographic categories by which we are linked to other examples of our types. Much of our contemporary talk about “identity” shuttles between proud affirmations of membership in groups and anxious insistence on our uncategorizable personal singularity. We long for connections and roots; we long to break free of tradition and cliché.   It demeans our sense of…

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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.