Chai Lights
Week of March 23rd
Featured Article
The Great Jewish Manuscript Sell-Off
When the institutions entrusted with Jewish memory quietly sell the originals, who’s minding the store?
📜 So here’s a fun thing that happened: the Jewish Theological Seminary sold its entire collection of personal letters by the Ramchal (that’s Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto for the uninitiated, only one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the last 300 years, no big deal). They did this in 2016. Nobody found out until a single letter popped up at auction in February 2026 and sold for $392,700. Nearly four hundred grand. For one letter. From a collection they let go of wholesale. We’re talking about a mystic-poet-ethicist whose fingerprints are on everything from the Baal Shem Tov to the Mussar movement, and his personal correspondence is now scattered to the winds of the rare Judaica market like confetti at a bar mitzvah nobody was invited to. Sclar’s point is devastating and simple: once the originals vanish into private ownership, scholarly possibilities vanish with them. Think of it this way: JTS was basically the Library of Alexandria for Ashkenazi intellectual history, and they held a quiet garage sale. 🔥
Read the full article (Tablet, February 19, 2026)
History & Heritage
You Can Now Walk to the Temple Mount on a 2,000-Year-Old Road. Yes, Really.
After 20 years of digging, Jerusalem’s ancient Pilgrimage Road is open for the first time since the Romans buried it.
🏛️ For two decades, archaeologists have been tunneling under modern Jerusalem to uncover the stone-paved road that millions of Jewish pilgrims once walked on their way up to the Temple for Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot. On January 20, 2026, the first public tours finally began. The road runs about 600 meters from the ancient Siloam Pool to the Western Wall area, still bearing the original Herodian paving stones that were sealed under rubble after the Roman destruction in 70 CE. “This is one of the most magnificent archaeological discoveries in Jerusalem in the last decades,” says IAA chief archaeologist Amit Re’em. “For the first time, you can see this direct link between the Siloam Pool and the Temple Mount.” Let that sink in: you can literally retrace the footsteps of your ancestors ascending to the Beit HaMikdash.
Read the full article (Times of Israel, February 2, 2026)
The Torah Ark That Took the Scenic Route to the Museum
From “Little Jerusalem” to the Boston MFA, via Texas and a rabbi with a moving truck.
🚚 This story has the narrative arc (pun fully intended) of a biblical journey: impending destruction, a last-minute rescue, a long wilderness wandering, and eventual redemption. A nearly 12-foot wooden Torah ark sat at the heart of Chelsea, Massachusetts’ Orange Street Synagogue until the shul closed in 1999. Chelsea was once so Jewish they called it “Little Jerusalem,” with 15 to 20 synagogues in two square miles. Rabbi David Whiman grabbed a crew of friends and salvaged the ark, then basically schlepped it across the country like a sacred carry-on for years before it landed at the Boston MFA. The kicker? With synagogues closing at a record pace, there’s now more supply of orphaned arks than there are homes for them.
Read the full article (The Forward, October 30, 2025)
Culture & Identity
Was Gatsby Jewish? Hemingway Seemed to Think So.
David Samuels reopens the Jewish question hiding in plain sight in American literature’s most famous novel.
📖 OK, this one is a banger for the literary nerds in the room (you know who you are). David Samuels, Tablet’s literary editor, looks at The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises, published just 16 months apart, the two novels that arguably defined American fiction more than any other pair, and argues they’re essentially in a dialogue with each other about... Jewishness. The self-invention. The outsider striving to belong. The name change (hello, Jay Gatz). Hemingway, who was not exactly subtle about his feelings on Jewish identity (see: Robert Cohn), may have written Sun Also Rises partly as an answer to what Fitzgerald was doing with Gatsby. It’s the kind of essay that makes you want to reread both novels immediately and then argue about them over too much wine. Which, honestly, is the highest compliment you can pay a piece of literary criticism. 🍷
Read the full article (Tablet, March 19, 2026)
Lore Segal Is Gone, But Her Characters Won’t Stop Talking
The Kindertransport survivor’s posthumous story collection is a masterclass in aging with wit intact.
✍️ Lore Segal died in 2024 at age 96 and left behind Still Talking, a posthumous collection starring her beloved “Ladies’ Lunch” crew: a group of fiercely intelligent Upper West Side women in their 80s and 90s who refuse to go gently into anything, thank you very much. These characters agree, without discussion, that they are “not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on. They were going to die.” That’s the energy of the whole book. Segal escaped Nazi Austria on the Kindertransport at age 10, grew up in English foster homes, and became one of the sharpest short story writers in the American canon. Her life and work are also the subject of an exhibit at the Leo Baeck Institute running through April 15. If you’ve never read Segal, start here. If you have, you already know you’re going to read this immediately. 💀❤️
Read the full article (The Forward, March 18, 2026)
Education
Teddy Bears, Barbie, and the Jews Who Invented American Childhood
From Lionel trains to Curious George, first-generation Jewish immigrants didn’t just assimilate into American culture. They built it.
🧸 Here’s a sentence you didn’t expect to read today: the modern American concept of childhood was, to a remarkable degree, engineered by Jewish immigrants. Jeffrey Salkin reviews Michael Kimmel’s Playmakers, which traces how the children of refugees from pogroms, who grew up in poverty, imagined something different for the next generation: a childhood they themselves had never had. Teddy bears. Lionel trains. Baseball cards. Curious George. Barbie. All created by Jews. But Kimmel goes further than a “who’s who” list. He argues that these entrepreneurs didn’t just make toys; they helped construct the entire cultural infrastructure of American childhood, from developmental psychology to parenting advice columns. It’s basically the ultimate “wait, that was Jewish too?!” book, and Salkin’s review makes a compelling case that it belongs on your shelf. Right next to the dreidel collection and that Mel Robbins book you haven’t finished. 😏
Read the full article (Tablet, February 26, 2026)