The year was 1923, and among the main attractions for European football fans were English football leagues’ summer tours of the Continent. The gaps between the nation that invented football and its Continental neighbors were vast. The latter had yet to take its first steps in the game. No other all-star league trumped England’s until […]

Much like other bygone vocations that did not survive the technological revolution, a photo studio is one of the institutes that’s been vanishing from the public sphere. The dark room, film strips, the hard labor of photo development, the thrilling expectation to find out how the photos turned out – were all replaced by digital […]

Catherine the Great, the Tsarina of Russia, was known for her insatiable lust. Legend has it that in her twilight years she grew tired of her lovers and turned to four-legged animals to satisfy her sexual needs. Those legends also claim that she went to her maker in the midst of passionate relations with a […]

In Jungian terms, Israel’s sweeping victory in 1967 symbolized an archetypal revolution of the common Jew. The archetypal passive, docile, and persecuted Diaspora “galut Jew” – whom Bialik slammed in his poem “City of Slaughter” in 1903 – morphed into that of the brave, heroic, flawless “Jewish soldier” who destroyed his mortal enemy in six […]

Gefilte fish is probably Eastern-European Jewry’s most famous dish. Other well-known Jewish delicacies include borsht, bagels and shmalz. Today, however, not many are aware that the names of these familiar foods are also Jewish surnames, as are babke, kishke, tzimes and more. There are at least a hundred Israelis with the family name Herring, and […]

Estee Ackerman, a 17-year-old Jewish girl from New York, is one of the top table tennis players in the United States, and is setting her sites on competing in the 2020 Olympics. As a Jewish table tennis champion, Ackerman is actually following in a long tradition of Jewish success in the sport. When table tennis […]

In one of Louis C.K.’s classic stand-up routines, he rails at the people who complain throughout inflight service. “You’re fucking sitting in a chair in the sky,” he roars. “And you have the nerve to complain that the omelet has no mushrooms?” A recent ride with a particularly nervous cab driver reminded me of that […]

Shame. That word seems to best define what Orthodox Marxists felt after World War I. “How did the tweedy high-brow men who filled the salons of Berlin, Vienna, and London screw up our proletarian revolution?” they asked each other. Why was it a Russian nation comprised mainly of illiterate farmers that adopted the collectivist utopia […]