(RNS) — As others have said, translating from one language to another is like kissing through a handkerchief: It’s close, but not the real thing. 

This is especially true when it involves translating the sacred Hebrew Bible, a text that millions of people believe is the literal word of God and whose “newest” additions to the canon are at least 1,900 years old.
How difficult is such a task?

Imagine that 1,900 years from now, in 3919, a future translator came across a sentence about politics that someone might write today: “Many ardent supporters are dancing in the end zone because they believe the senator hit it out of the park with yesterday’s speech.  As a result, they happily assert, the ball is now in someone else’s court.”
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To understand this mix of metaphors demands a familiarity with contemporary football, baseball and basketball terminology. They’d need to know that “the park” in this case does not mean a public area set aside for relaxation, flowers and trees, but rather a sports stadium. The translator of the distant future would also need to know that the word “court” in this context denotes an athletic arena, and not a place to adjudicate legal issues, nor does it mean an ingratiating description of gaining the favor of someone. Only then could an authentic translation even begin.

During his lifetime, Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was frequently confused with another internationally famous photographer: his friend Edward Steichen. So, too, were Stieglitz’s remarkable achievements often overshadowed by the fame of his wife, artist Georgia O’Keeffe.

But Phyllis Rose’s book Alfred Stieglitz: Taking Pictures, Making Painters (part of Yale’s Jewish Lives series) brings her subject out of the shadows and into his deserved place in history as the person who made “taking pictures” a respected art form. Rose, a literary critic and a retired professor of English literature at Wesleyan University, has combined her knowledge of photography and modern art with an excellent grasp of the historical trends and events that shaped the artistic world from the Victorian and Gilded Ages to the end of World War II.

Alfred Stieglitz was born in Hoboken, New Jersey into a wealthy, highly cultured German-Jewish family. His parents had immigrated to the United States from Germany following the failed political revolution in 1848. Alfred’s father, Edward, was a kunstmensch, an art man who “read Schiller, Goethe, and Shakespeare…studied works by Rubens, Rembrandt, and Leonardo…”

​(RNS) — There have been more positive encounters between Roman Catholics and the Jewish people since the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council in 1965 than there were in the first 2,000 years of the Christian church. But one major flashpoint has remained unresolved: the bitter controversy swirling around the role played by Eugenio Pacelli, whose 19-year pontificate as Pius XII began in 1939, in the wartime treatment of European Jews.

Today Pope Francis announced that the Vatican archives covering Pius XII’s reign will at last be opened. I have been personally involved in this dispute for more than three decades and have long demanded that this obstacle needs to be fully and finally removed if the historic revolution in Catholic-Jewish relations is to deepen and advance.

The most serious charge made against Pius XII by his critics, Catholic and Jewish, is that he was inactive, indifferent, and ineffective in the face of Nazi Germany’s horrific policy of mass murder during the Holocaust, when six million Jews were killed in the heart of what Pope John Paul II has called “Christian Europe.”

(RNS) — The four saddest words in the English language are “what might have been.…”
Eighty years ago, as war clouds gathered over Europe, the 33-year-old Christian theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, then a faculty member at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan, returned to his native Germany after a short stay in the United States.

At the time, Bonhoeffer believed his church’s response to Hitler and Nazism was marked by weakness and cowardice. He saw his country consumed by a monstrous cancer that had devoured nations and had already murdered many hundreds of people on its way to murdering millions.

Frustrated and angered, Bonhoeffer went home to join the political underground movement in Germany. He wrote: “Not in the flight of ideas, but only in action is freedom. Make up your mind and come out into the tempest of living.”
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It was a fateful and ultimately lethal decision. Six years later, on April 9, 1945, a month before the end of World War II in Europe, the Nazis executed Bonhoeffer for his opposition to the regime.

Many American Jews shuddered as Donald Trump proclaimed, “The American Dream is dead!” and “America first!” to rally crowds during his 2016 presidential campaign. We remembered how, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, these slogans were an open call for virulent anti-Semitism, pro-Nazi sentiment, white supremacy, xenophobia, and nativism.

Sarah Churchwell, a professor of American literature and humanities at the University of London, deftly deconstructs the origins and evolution of those two highly charged phrases in her new book Behold, America: The Entangled History of “America First” and “The American Dream” (Basic Books).

The term “The American Dream” first appeared in a 1900 editorial in the New York Evening Post, a newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton and owned today by Rupert Murdoch. It warned readers that “discontented multimillionaires” constitute the “greatest risk” to “every republic” and threatened “The American Dream.” In its original context, the term represented a broad-based progressive aspiration for a just, equitable, and freedom-loving society.

German Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemöller is best known for his celebrated confession:
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• First, they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out--
• Because I was not a Communist.
• Then they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out--
• Because I was not a Socialist.
• Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out--
• Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
• Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
• Because I was not a Jew.
• Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

These oft-quoted words at Holocaust commemorative observances might lead you to believe that Niemöller was sympathetic to Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. Not true.

Matthew D. Hockenos, professor of History at Skidmore College and author of Then They Came for Me (Basic Books, 2018), writes that Niemöller (1892-1984) was not incarcerated in concentration camps because he opposed the mass murder of Jews or other atrocities, but for insisting on the political autonomy of German Protestant churches in Nazi Germany.

Does the world need yet another book about Adolf Hitler?

To my mind, three British prominent historians – Alan Bullock, Richard J. Evans, and Ian Kershaw – have definitively covered the subject for English-speaking readers.

Still, fascination of the German Fuhrer does not abate, as evidenced by Cory Taylor’s addition to the genre with How Hitler Was Made: Germany and the Rise of the Perfect Nazi (Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York, 2018).  An Emmy award-winning documentary filmmaker, Taylor delves into Germany’s post-World War I years (1918-1924), the time when Hitler became “the perfect Nazi.”  
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The first 104 pages of his 274-page book detail the political upheavals in Munich, the Bavarian capital, during the six chaotic years following the 1918 Armistice and the collapse of the German Empire. We learn of Soviet-style leaders in Bavaria, coups and counter-coups, assassinations, street clashes pitting Communists against armed right-wing army veterans, and the emergence of gangs of thugs who emulated the brutal tactics of Italian fascist leader, Benito Mussolini.

In Mavericks, Mystics & False Messiahs: Episodes from the Margins of Jewish History, Pini Dunner provides a series of bizarre stories describing how some Jews crashed through conventional guardrails of staid Jewish tradition and sped forward onto aberrant lanes of false messiahs, forgers of Passover Haggadot, rabbis searching for subversive religious meanings of Hebrew amulets, and an 18th-century British lord who converted to Judaism. Best of all, there is the raffish tale of a 20th-century Jewish con man who makes all other imposters in history look like amateur frauds.

Dunner, an Orthodox rabbi who leads a Beverly Hills, California, congregation, combines an expertise in ancient Hebrew manuscripts with a command of rabbinic texts and Jewish history to bring his band of Jewish miscreants to life.  

Heading Dunner’s list is the infamous Shabbatai Tzvi (1626-1676). Born in Turkey, Shabbatai attracted a large number of Jewish followers who fervently believed he was the long awaited Messiah. Dunner writes:

“…he [Shabbatai]  was …joyful, exuberant, and ecstatic, while at other times he was depressed, anxious, paranoid, and passive…symptoms of acute manic depression, or bipolar syndrome…To [his] detractors his behavior was evidence he was an evil madman. To his supporters… his strange behavior attested to the fact that he was divine and a holy man.”
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On May 31, 1665 Shabbatai publicly declared he was the “King of the Jews” and the “Redeemer” of Israel. His followers were delirious with joy, especially because Shabbatai Tzvi had repudiated much of the rigorous religious and moral laws of Judaism and encouraged wild sexual excesses.

(RNS) — The brutality of anti-Semitism in several forms dominated the top 10 news stories related to Jews and Judaism this year. But there were important and even happy developments as well.
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1. The Tree of Life synagogue shooting
The “slaughter of the innocents” in a Pittsburgh synagogue in October was the single worst anti-Jewish attack in U.S. history, with 11 worshippers killed (among them were two of my cousins, Cecil and David Rosenthal). The swift public revulsion and denunciation of the massacre cut across all religious, ethnic and racial boundaries and resulted in a vast outpouring of support for the American Jewish community.

2. U.S. embassy moves to Jerusalem
In May, the U.S. embassy in Israel officially relocated from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, as President Trump followed through on a December 2017 announcement. The move, met with both celebration and foreboding from political and faith leaders at the time, has been largely overwhelmed by other events, including violent attempts to breach the Jewish state’s borders by Palestinians in Gaza, Iran’s continued support of the brutal Syrian regime and the terrorist group Hezbollah based in Lebanon, and the discovery of several Hezbollah secret military tunnels that encroached into Israeli territory. Though Saudi Arabia’s King Salman was among those who criticized the embassy move, Israel strengthened its diplomatic outreach to Saudi Arabia this year.
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(RNS) — On a chilly, rainy Sunday in April 1991, my wife Marcia and I were among a small number of religious leaders who spent nearly six hours with President George H.W. Bush at Camp David. We were there for the dedication service of the newly constructed interreligious chapel at the presidential retreat in Maryland, which had also served as a relaxed but conducive place for top-level diplomatic negotiations.

For more than two years, Protestant, Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox clergy and laypeople and myself, the sole Jewish member of the group, had worked together to raise private funds for a building to be used for worship, study, and meditation by presidents, their families, camp support staff and, of course, visiting world leaders.
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FDR was the first chief executive to use the former Boy Scout campsite north of Washington as an escape from the brutal Washington summer heat. Though the exact location was kept from the public — President Roosevelt called the retreat “Shangri-La,” adding to its mystery — it is only seventy-four miles from the capital in the Catoctin mountains of Maryland.