What Donald Trump Gets Right about Israel and the Arabs
The Middle East has too often been a screen onto which outsiders project their own psychodramas.
October 17, 2019
Moses Mendelssohn, Idolatry, and Baseball Cards
Mistaking the sign for the thing itself.
Reminiscing about his childhood enthusiasm for collecting baseball cards, Abraham Socher notes that he and his friends imbued these objects with an almost-metaphysical connection to the players depicted upon them. In this way, a card was not unlike an idol that, “in representing the god, . . . becomes a conduit for its power.” The connection puts Socher in mind of the 18th-century Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn’s theory of idolatry, which connects the phenomenon to the development of writing itself with the help of a speculative history in which primitive man discovered how to express himself through ever-greater abstraction:
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Login or SubscribeOctober 17, 2019
A New Biography Distorts History to Defame Ben-Gurion
Israel’s first prime minister was no enthusiast of ethnic cleansing.
Alienating Arabs, and a Last-Minute Campaign for Video Cameras at Polling Centers, May Have Cost the Likud the Election
Lessons for the Israeli right.
Moses Mendelssohn, Idolatry, and Baseball Cards
Mistaking the sign for the thing itself.
The Etrog’s Magical—and Literary—Power
In Ashkenazi folklore, the fruit was a charm for fertility.