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Just like in the different categories of popular culture, where there are big and widely known names, including creators, writers or performers – the very mention of whose name is enough to spark interest or cause people to take out their credit card – there are also the small names. Needless to say, great works have been created by people belonging to both groups. But quite often the small and unfamiliar names are the most interesting ones because their path in the world of culture, which transcends periods and places, is surprising, elusive and baffling. That holds true for the[…]

Everyone knows who Shai (Shmuel Yosef) Agnon is thanks to the fiction he wrote. But one of his best-known books, and perhaps his greatest and most ambitious undertaking, was actually an anthology – a compendium as that genre was called at the time – which was published in 1938. Agnon compiled and edited the anthology Days of Awe: A Treasure of Jewish Wisdom for Reflection, Repentance, and Renewal on the High Holy Days, whose Hebrew title is Yamim Noraim – High Holy Days – which can also be translated as ‘terrible days.’ It contains stories and commentaries dealing with Rosh[…]

Nessim Joseph Dawood, who translated the Quran into English in the middle of the 20th century, was not, of course, the first to translate the Holy Book of Islam into English. But he is responsible for its most widely read and popular translation. Interestingly enough, one of the people who deserves the most credit for introducing Islamic culture to the West was a Jew. The Jew in question was born in Baghdad, Iraq to the Yehuda family – a longstanding and highly respected Jewish family that left the Land of Israel prior to the destruction of the First Temple. However,[…]

“The bank was located on El-Batrak Street (present day David Street) in the Old City, near the vegetable stalls and the grocery stores, which also sold fish. The bank itself was situated between two vegetable stalls, whose crates took up a large part of the street. You would enter via a narrow passageway, at the end which there were two spacious rooms, where Aharon Valero ran his banking business.” That’s how Gad Frumkin described Jacob Valero & Company, the first private bank in pre-State Israel, in his book Derech Shofet B’Yerushalayim – The Path of a Judge. The bank’s founder,[…]

The Forgotten Singer: The Exiled Sister of I.J. and Isaac Bashevis Singer, written by Maurice Carr, was recently published by White Goat Press, the imprint of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. Carr has already been dead for 20 years, but only now has this biography come out, in which the author seeks historical justice for his mother, Esther Kreitman. The forgotten author, who only in recent years has begun to receive recognition as one of the first Jewish feminist writers, was overshadowed by her famous brothers. They did not support her literary career and gave her no financial[…]

The inscription on Dr. Bat Sheva Yonis-Gutman’s headstone at Trumpeldor Cemetery in downtown Tel Aviv does not cite her date of birth, but only the date of her emigration to Israel. That was common practice among members of the Second Aliyah, who wanted to leave behind every trace of their lives in the Diaspora and be reborn in the Land of Israel. Just so you know, one of the first female physicians in Israel’s pre-State community was born on January 1, 1880 in Tarutyne, a village in the southwest region of the former Russian Empire. Her father, Shlomo, was a[…]

“Tell them in these words: I am a Jew and I refuse.” That is what Captain Leo Skurnik said when he learned that the Germans had recommended that he receive an Iron Cross medal for his heroism on the battlefield. Skurnik, a medical officer in the Finnish army, organized the evacuation of a field hospital under heavy Russian shelling, saving the lives of around 600 Wehrmacht soldiers. When the Germans wanted to punish him for his rebuff, Skurnik’s commander, General Hjalmar Siilasvuo, told them: “You don’t really expect that I’ll hand over my best doctor?” Skurnik was not the only[…]

Nearly 100 years ago, nearly 500,000 Jews who lived in poverty in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and worked in the garment industry in deplorable conditions, decided that they had had enough. Those Jews had emigrated to America to flee from antisemitism in Europe, and now they were forced to flee again. This time they fled from the neglect and filth of the Lower East Side, but their destination was not very far away. They moved uptown to the northeastern part of New York City, to the Bronx, where they sought to establish a neighborhood of inhabitable houses and[…]