Originally published in the Forward March 31, 2000. As the packed houses for the recent Israeli film “Kadosh” testify, the Chasidim these days are a big draw and an even bigger drag. The dark world ...

Chasidism was never a re-creation of a vanished pre-modern Jewish world. The book’s authors are at pains to stress that it cannot be defined as traditional. But it is traditionalist, in the sense that ...

The Chasidic movement within Judaism originated in Eastern Europe in the middle to late eighteenth century. Although Chasidism today is identified as part of Orthodox Judaism, in its origins it was ...

‘We are the heirs of the chasidism that would have been created by all the rebbes who were killed in the Holocaust,” Daniel Siegel told the 200 Jewish spiritual seekers who gathered last month for the ...

International scholar who researched early Chasidism and the role of gender in Jewish mysticism Become a member Support our work ...

“The Seventh Beggar” by Pearl Abraham, (Riverhead, $25.95). A key dropped down a drain by a brother later proves to be an exit sign for his sister lost wandering in the sewers. A boy faints and it is ...

This video from the PBS series The Story of the Jews examines how, in the middle of the eighteenth century, Chasidism offered an antidote to despair for beleaguered Jewish communities living in small ...