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Holiday Learning and Resources

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Nusah & Cantillation

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Featured

When a Question Threatens

When a Question Threatens

Jun 19, 2026 By Sarah Wolf | Commentary | Korah

In this week’s parashah, Korah organizes a group of two hundred and fifty well-respected people to protest Moses and Aaron’s leadership. “You have gone too far,” Korah and his group announce. “For all the community is holy, all of them, and God is in their midst. Why then do you raise yourself above God’s congregation?” (Num. 16:3). Moses is appalled, God is furious, and in response, the earth opens up and swallows the protesters, their households, and all their possessions. What are we as readers to make of this episode? Do we attempt to creatively rehabilitate Korah, despite his divine punishment, as an example of those who bravely attempt to speak truth to power? Or do we side with Moses and try to figure out why Korah must have truly deserved what he got?

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The Changing Landscape of Jewish American Literature

The Changing Landscape of Jewish American Literature

Jun 15, 2026 By Benjamin Resnick | Public Event video | Video Lecture

For decades, Jewish American literature was defined by giants like Roth, Bellow, Malamud, and Ozick, whose novels explored assimilation and the immigrant experience. But what defines Jewish American writing today? Author and JTS alum Rabbi Benjamin Resnick reflects on how the field has changed and asks whether the Jewish American novel still exists in the way readers once understood it. 

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Grapes of Canaan

Grapes of Canaan

Jun 12, 2026 By Achia Anzi | Commentary | Shelah Lekha

The spies’ illustration epitomizes the power of images but also their hermeneutic limitations. Of the complex story that Parashat Shelach Lekha relates concisely, the grapes are a central motif in the visual tradition that illustrates it. For a biblical story to become an image, the artist must focus not only on the sayable but also the seeable. Hence, throughout history, images have often been presented alongside words. For example, the ancient mosaic from the Huqoq Synagogue depicts the two spies, along with the inscription “במוט בשניים”.[2

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Jewish Storytelling and American Law in Post-WWII America 

Jewish Storytelling and American Law in Post-WWII America 

Jun 8, 2026 By Shira Billet | Public Event video | Video Lecture

In the decades after World War II, Jewish American legal thinkers began drawing on biblical and rabbinic stories to help explore fundamental questions of constitutional interpretation. The work of Robert Cover in the 1980s, first developed in the context of the Vietnam war, is the most famous and influential example. But lesser-known figures such as Edmund Cahn and JTS professor Shalom Spiegel began developing this discourse in the context of the postwar moment in 1950s America, and the civil rights movement that emerged in its wake.

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Independence Day

Independence Day

Jun 5, 2026 By Emmanuel Bloch | Commentary | Beha'alotekha

In Escape from Freedom (1941), Erich Fromm argued that freedom is not merely liberation from external constraints (“freedom from”) but also entails the capacity for self-realization and responsible action (“freedom to”). One of the most puzzling passages in Beha-alotekha reflects a similar insight.

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