Ynet has an article (Hebrew) about Roni Weinstein’s new book, Shavru et ha-Keilim (“They Broke the Vessels”). Weinstein’s book is subtitled “The Kabbalah and Jewish Modernity.” In this book Weinstein claims that modern religious Judaism cannot be understand without reference to the Kabbalah. He is quoted as saying:

The Kabbalah is like a bomb that was dropped hundreds of years ago, but its aftershocks just keep expanding with the passing of the years.

Kabbalah emphasized the eternity of the moment.

According to Weinstein, [the Kabbalistic belief that man's actions have an immediate affect on God] created a new idea-that every single moment of a person’s life is unique (חד-פעמי): Every mitzvah that you perform has its uniqueness, such that if you don’t pray mincha as you should-you missed the moment. The meaning of this is a life of urgency, since a person can never do enough, a feeling of sin and guilt accompanies him wherever he turns.

The table of contents can be found here, and the first chapter can be found here.

Q. I recently overheard a conversation about food in which someone mentioned “Jewish Champagne.” What is that?

A. We’re going to assume the speaker was not referring to the French region, centered on Troyes, whose rabbinical scholars led an intellectual flowering in the 12th century.

Closer to home, “Jewish Champagne” is a reference, dating from the 1930s, to seltzer or, more specifically, to Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Soda, a carbonated drink flavored with celery seeds and sweetened with sugar. Ethel Merman and Guy Lombardo were among the celebrities who swore by it.

…

See the rest of the answer here.

Happy July 4th.

How persistent are cultural traits? This paper uses data on anti-Semitism in Germany and finds continuity at the local level over more than half a millennium. When the Black Death hit Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the population, its cause was unknown. Many contemporaries blamed the Jews. Cities all over Germany witnessed mass killings of their Jewish population. At the same time, numerous Jewish communities were spared these horrors. We use plague pogroms as an indicator for medieval anti-Semitism. Pogroms during the Black Death are a strong and robust predictor of violence against Jews in the 1920s, and of votes for the Nazi Party. In addition, cities that saw medieval anti-Semitic violence also had higher deportation rates for Jews after 1933, were more likely to see synagogues damaged or destroyed in the Night of Broken Glass in 1938, and their inhabitants wrote more anti-Jewish letters to the editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer.