Jewish history

Keeping time: How Jews preserved ritual and hope in the Holocaust’s darkest days

Yad Vashem exhibition chronicles the times and lives of Jewish communities before and during the Holocaust.

A Hanukkah candlelighting ceremony at the Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands, December 1943.
GOODWILL: PROVIDING volunteer massage therapy to soldiers at an IDF outpost in Samaria, March 12.

Parashat Emor: The social revolution

Adding Hebrew letters to a dreidel at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum.

Jewish Shanghai: From refuge to renewal, exploring the living history of a city’s Jewish legacy

PROF. YISRAEL AUMANN speaks at a Nov. 2005 news conference at the Hebrew University, after winning the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on conflict and cooperation through game theory analysis. He shares the prize with American economist Thomas Schelling.

From Passover to sirens: Why Jewish survival still demands action - opinion


The Great Inversion: When Israel became the Diaspora's shield - opinion

It is no longer the Diaspora nurturing and protecting tenuous Israel. Now it is the reverse.

An illustrative image of a Star of David.

This week in Jewish history: Yearning for Zion

A highly abridged weekly version of Dust & Stars – Today in Jewish History.

PORTRAIT OF Jewish poet Naftali Herz Imber, from The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia, 1920.

Prophet Zechariah: Not by might nor power, but by spirit

These words are a declaration of faith and a clear-cut explanation of Jewish survival.

Mourners accompany the body of Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who was murdered during the Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, Australia, on December 14.

Beyond the Headlines: First night of Hanukkah in Australia - opinion

A weekly glimpse into the Israel you won’t read about in the news

Rabbi Aharon Tzohar with Saba Shmuel.

This Hanukkah, my synagogue is illuminating our walls with relics of our Jewish immigrant stories

What better place to encourage people to learn and share their own immigrant history, digging out the details of who came when, from where and why?

An exhibition launching in December 2025 at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism in New York City celebrates congregants' family immigration stories.

Jews need new story of Hanukkah or risk losing next Jewish generation to disillusionment - opinion

It is time for a new Hanukkah, kind and compassionate, turning narrow nationalism into a universalist pursuit of the world to come promised by our prophets.

 An illustrative image of Hanukkah candles lit.

The struggle to perceive miracles in real time links Hanukkah’s origins to recent events - opinion

From the Maccabees to modern Israel, people miss miracles as they occur and grasp them only later.

The site of the Israeli airstrike that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last year, in Beirut’s southern suburbs: Today’s Jews can’t perceive the miraculous nature of the events of the last two years, the writer maintains.

Greek textbooks discuss Judaism, Holocaust in detail, but fall short on antisemitism

Greek textbooks give limited attention to local Jewish history and contributions to Greek society. Even though they include Jewish history and misfortunes, the books leave antisemitism behind.

A slogan reading "Outside the Jewish Snakes" is written outside a Jewish synagoue in the central Greek town of Trikala, some 300 kilometers north of Athens, on December 31, 2019

Zionism beyond Europe: Restoring the Mizrahi narrative in Jewish education - opinion

Theodor Herzl stood on the shoulders of these pioneers, and his ideas for a Jewish state can be traced directly to them.

 Jewish girls at a school performance in Benghazi, Lybia.

AI opens vast trove of medieval Jewish records from the Cairo Geniza

The Cairo Geniza, the biggest collection of medieval Jewish documents in the world, has been the object of countless hours of study by scholars for more than a century.

A researcher of MiDRASH, a project dedicated to analysing the National Library of Israel’s digital database of all known Hebrew manuscripts using Machine Learning, including manuscripts from the Cairo Geniza, holds up a 12th century fragment of a Yom Kippur liturgy in Jerusalem November 24, 2025.