Sublime

Another paradoxical courtier, Arthur Meyer, saw only white, the color of French royalty. His paper, Le Gaulois, which circulated like a house organ among Paris’s upper crust, offered sufficient proof of his anti-Semitism to earn him forgiveness for having been born Jewish.

And like the Holocaust before it, Tikkun Olam tended to sideline Israel as the focal point of American Jewish purpose. How can we donate to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, liberal Jews increasingly asked, when children went hungry in Honduras?

Yet there is ample evidence of name changing: thousands of court records from the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s of Jewish immigrants and their children filing petitions in New York City Civil Court in order to change their own family names.

The French writer Stendhal, in his 1817 travelogue, Rome, Naples, and Florence, described

At the beginning of 1911, the Jewish world and Ben-Gurion himself were scandalized by an article the Hebrew novelist Yosef Haim Brenner published in the newspaper Hapo’el Hatza’ir. The subject was Jews who had converted to Christianity.22 Brenner maintained that there was a Jewish national identity independent of religion and that this identity had