Amanda Unvarnished

The English word “resilience,” from the Latin resilire, literally means “to rebound.” For most of its 400-year history, the term was understood as a property of an object. The resilience of a material was determined by its ability to bounce back under stress and resume its original form or shape. In recent decades, this mechanical […]

In an essay in Commentary in 1994, the historian Jonathan D. Sarna pushed back on the Jewish community’s then-obsession with “continuity.” Continuity had become the rallying cry of North American Jewish Federations and JCCs, and Sarna was making the case that “when Jewish life has been threatened,” the solution often came from discontinuity: a break […]

Left antisemitism, acceptable racism, and the post-liberalism of fools