Among the Insurgents  Jonathan Spyer,  Tablet.  Smuggled into Syria, a reporter finds that the Free Syrian Army lacks leadership but is fiercely united against Bashar al-Assad and Iran.  SAVE

Pareve or Starve  David Errico-Nagar,  Kol Hamevaser.  While his predecessors praised vegetarianism as an ideal but not as a practice, Joseph B. Soloveitchik was fully in favor of Jews abstaining from meat.  SAVE

So You Want to Be Jerusalem Bureau Chief  Ron Kampeas,  Foreign Policy.  How—and how not—to tackle the most delicate assignment in journalism.  SAVE

Elite Philanthropy in Israel  Jacqueline Pfeffer Merrill,  Philanthropy Daily.  Two scholars see a distinctive pattern emerging among elite Israeli philanthropists. For starters, they're not particularly religious.  SAVE

Jewish Literacy and Jewish Imagination  Samuel Lebens,  Haaretz.  If they wish to make an impact, progressive Jewish activists and thinkers must learn to speak the language of Judaism.  SAVE

Hitler Slept Here  Aimee Neistat,  Haaretz.  For six months, an American writer traveled Germany, interviewing locals and exploring the legacy of Nazism. What did he find? A still-extant obsession with Jews.  SAVE

Chaos Theory  Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi,  Haaretz.  Despite Israeli fears, the Arab Spring will not translate into hostile Islamic theocracies across the Middle East. Instead, the region's popular revolts will divide Israel's enemies.  SAVE

Frankly, My Dear  Alan Brill,  Book of Doctrines and Opinions.  The Frankist movement led many Jews to convert to Catholicism and join the lower nobility in Poland. But this was no ordinary assimilation, as Jewish theology came to infuse the whole gentry.  SAVE

Digging Tiberias  Matti Friedman,  Times of Israel.  Long beloved of archeologists but overshadowed by more famous sites, the ancient metropolis of Tiberias is finally emerging from underneath soil, rubble, and the remnants of an old garbage dump.  SAVE

Mourning, Melancholia, and Maimonides  Jon Sommer,  Zeek.  Perhaps because a number of medieval Jewish philosophers were also mathematicians and astronomers, their writings on suffering offer commonsensical guidance still useful today.  SAVE

Paupers’ Cemetery  Nadav Shragai,  Israel Hayom.  For over a century, the Sambusky Cemetery on Mount Zion has been looted for masonry and covered with garbage. But now plans are afoot to restore it and properly commemorate its dead.  SAVE

The Grapes of Roth  Daniel Johnson,  Literary Review.  The correspondence of Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth displays his sparkling wit and contrarian sensibilities, but testifies above all to his terminal decline into alcoholism.  SAVE

Newton the Theologian  Aron Heller,  Associated Press.  Known for revolutionizing empirical science, Isaac Newton was also an influential theologian. His writings on Scripture and mysticism (as well as his prediction of the apocalypse) have now been digitized in Israel.  SAVE

Tramp Stamp  Tom Whitehead,  Daily Telegraph.  Suspecting his Communist sympathies, the CIA and MI5 began investigating Charlie Chaplin. Would his missing birth certificate verify the speculation that he was really a Russian Jew?  SAVE

Israel’s African Influx  Dan Kosky,  Times of Israel.  If Netanyahu genuinely wants to control illegal immigration to Israel from Africa, he should be constructing a proper legal process to separate economic migrants from asylum seekers.  SAVE

The False Crusade  Peter Frankopan,  New York Times.  The medieval narrative of the First Crusade as a Papal expedition to conquer Jerusalem is still rarely questioned; yet the roots of the Crusade lie not in Rome but rather in Byzantium.  SAVE

Incentivizing Organ Donation  Danielle Ofri,  New York Times.  Israel, until now ranked at the bottom of Western countries on organ donation, has started incorporating "nonmedical" criteria into the priority-based transplant list for organs. It's working.  SAVE

Education vs. Advocacy  David Bernstein,  eJewish Philanthropy.  The need to balance critical thinking and national pride is not limited to Israel education. But while education and advocacy are not one and the same, neither are they mutually exclusive.  SAVE

Festive Meal  Ezra Glinter,  The Jew and the Carrot.  There was the cholent, cooked in enormous stockpots in the oven. Then kishka, cold cuts on challah, and coleslaw, topped off by three or four Italian ices in paper tubes. Ah, Shabbes lunch at yeshiva . . .  SAVE

States’ Rights  Michael Walzer,  Jewish Chronicle.  "There is a sense in which Israel is right now politically a state of all its citizens. The real difficulties are not political, they are cultural, and they arise in every nation state." (Interview by Alan Johnson)  SAVE

The Least of These  Matti Friedman,  Times of Israel.  In 1872, a German architect became one of the only Westerners ever allowed to investigate underneath the Temple Mount. The wooden model he created remains a key source of information for archeologists.  SAVE