Coming off some of the tunnels are chambers, irregular in their outlines and with dozens of small connecting rooms.

The map’s place names traverse a range of cultural registers, from the classical to the surreal to the military-industrial. The Room of Cubes. The Boutique of Psychosis. Crossroads of the Dead. The Medusa. Bunker Under the Mountain. The Monastery of the Bears. Ossa Arida. Room Z. Affordance is specified on the map in handwritten cursive words: “Low,” “Quite low,” “Very low,” “Tight,” “Flooded,” “Impracticable,” “Impassable.”

The current debate over intersectionality is really three debates: one based on what academics like Crenshaw actually mean by the term, one based on how activists seeking to eliminate disparities between groups have interpreted the term, and a third on how some conservatives are responding to its use by those activists.

Crenshaw has watched all this with no small measure of surprise. “This is what happens when an idea travels beyond the context and the content,” she said.

I suppose people do try to fill in the gaps in their knowledge by invoking supernatural explanations. But many other situations prompt supernatural explanations. Perhaps the most common one is thinking there’s a ritual that can help us when we’re doing something with a high risk of failure. Lots of people go to football matches wearing their lucky pants or lucky shirt. And you get players doing all sorts of rituals when there’s a high-risk situation like taking a penalty kick.

…it is hardly enough to argue that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. In at least one crucial way it’s worse than that. Anti-Semitism revolves around an emotion — hate. Anti-Zionism revolves around an action — destruction.

Anti-Zionism must be fought on its own terms. Demonizing Israel and singling it out for special condemnation is immoral and discriminatory regardless of any claims of anti-Semitism.

What she called out was so unlike anything I expected to hear in Soho that I wondered whether I’d really heard it.

“Free Palestine!”

Could that be right? “Free Palestine!” in the middle of Soho at lunchtime.

I raised my eyes and looked around but everything was as normal. There was only the lingering presence of the words, like dust caught in a shaft of light. Had the woman passed me on the street? Had she leaned out of the window of an expensive restaurant? And how did I know her exhortation was intended for me, anyway?

Gay Orthodox rabbis will be able to ask more from their “congregants” than straight ones in all sorts of religious and communal areas, for they possess a shared experience and language – and thus credibility. A gay Orthodox rabbi presents a role model for young people who report that they are sorely alone in deciding the course of their lives. A gay Orthodox rabbi will be someone to emulate, to debate and to confide in as they mature.

Rabbi Marc Philippe: When I was a child in school in Africa, we got rewarded when we behaved and got a slap on the bottom when we misbehaved. We all behaved amazingly well – but this is not free will… if things were this simple with our creator, we would have no free will. Things are not that simple. So what is the Torah trying to tell us here?

If you follow My laws and faithfully observe My commandments, I will grant your rains in their season, so that the earth shall yield its produce and the trees of the field their fruit. – Leviticus 26:3-4

Rabbi Jill Zimmerman: At first glance, this verse is not true. The theology that suggests following God’s commandments will be rewarded, while disobeying them will be punished, has been rejected by most of us. We all know good people who suffer, and criminals who escape justice.

There is a strange comment hidden in the painful verses of Bechukotai that may allude to why that is. The aforementioned verses continue “they will stumble over each other as they would before a sword, though no one is chasing them; you will have no power to stand before your enemies” (ibid. v. 37).

Rashi quotes the Midrash here that explains: “Do not read this as saying they will stumble over each other; rather it means they will stumble because of each other — because of each other’s sins. This teaches that all Israel are responsible one for another [kol Yisrael areivim zeh lazeh].”

David Suissa hosts Middle East expert David Reaboi to do a deep dive on the two faces Qatar shows to the world.

David Reaboi: On one hand, I wanted to draw attention to Qatar itself and the malevolent influence it’s had on the United States, Israel, and the region. On the other hand, I wanted to talk about how this influence happened in the United States – that’s where you get into a lot of Jewish lobbyists who kind of shamefully took this very lucrative gig.

“But for some people, watching Indiana Jones isn’t enough. Jim Barfield is a firefighter and a criminal investigator from Oklahoma, with a passion for the Bible, and a fascination with the Dead Sea Scrolls, particularly the Copper Scroll, which unlike the other dead sea scrolls, is not a literary work, but rather a list of places. But not just random places, places where supposedly, buried in the ground are various items of gold and silver. In other words, a bonafide treasure map.”

“…the museum’s new permanent exhibition—titled Scenes from the Collection—couldn’t be farther from realizing Finkelstein’s ambition, as Menachem Wecker has demonstrated in Mosaic’s May Essay. Filled largely with kitsch, nostalgic and otherwise, the exhibition does little more than flatter the shallowest of contemporary cultural attitudes toward Jews and Judaism.”