A voice that was freed – and now is silence

By Michael Berenbaum
Published on February 13, 2013

Rabbi David Hartman has gone to his eternal rest, but not before he made a monumental contribution to Jewish life and a significant contribution to Jewish thought.

Jewish philosopher Rabbi David Hartman dies

Published on February 10, 2013

Rabbi David Hartman, a Jewish philosopher who founded the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, has died.

‘Red Emma’ Doc Lacks Activist’s Fire

By Tom Tugend
Published on April 8, 2004

"The Hebrew Anarchist Comes to Town" a 1893 New York Times article alarmingly proclaimed. To other reporters, she was "Red Emma, Queen of the Anarchists."

A Life to the Mind

By Ellen Jaffe-Gill
Published on November 7, 2002

What you notice in almost every shot is the hair: abundant, snow-white, carefully coiffed.

It's an apt metaphor for Jacques Derrida's mind, which is prolific with ideas, yet well-ordered and consistent in its probity and depth. In a new documentary, filmmakers Amy Ziering Kofman and Kirby Dick make arresting cinema from the mind, memories and habits of a man whose life has been devoted to thought.

Derrida, a Jew born in Algeria in 1930, is identified with deconstructionism, a system of thought that challenges established assumptions about the knowledge of what is true and real. But the 85-minute film is far from a static parade of talking heads. Exposition of Derrida's ideas comes mostly through voice-over readings from his books that accompany shots of the philosopher walking from one place to another or scenes of a gritty, industrial Paris rushing past a moving car.