The tagline of The Jew News Review is l’dor v’dor.

From generation to generation.

When I launched this publication nearly five years ago, I chose those words because they captured something essential about Jewish life: the responsibility each generation bears to pass something meaningful to the next.

For nearly two years, much of my writing has focused on threats to Jewish life. October 7. The hostages. Antisemitism. Iran. Campus protests. Israel’s wars.

Those conversations mattered then, and they still matter now.

The Jewish people are living through one of the most consequential periods in modern Jewish history, and I have felt an obligation to write about it. But that was never the only reason I started The Jew News Review.

One of my goals was much simpler. I wanted my children, nieces, nephews, and now my grandchildren to feel connected to something larger than themselves. And recently, that raised a more foundational question.

What exactly am I trying to preserve?

The answer, I realized, has less to do with the threats we face than with what generations of Jews believed was worth preserving. That realization came into sharper focus recently after learning more about Dara Horn, author of the acclaimed book People Love Dead Jews, and her new Tell Institute.

One of the themes running through Horn’s work is that people often know what happened to Jews while knowing far less about what Jews actually believed, taught, or contributed. We know the tragedies. We know the persecutions. We know the Holocaust. Increasingly, we know October 7. What we often know far less about is what Jews were trying to preserve all along.

That struck me because, in my own way, I had fallen into the same trap. I had spent a great deal of time explaining why Jewish life deserves defending and much less time explaining why Jewish life has been worth preserving.

In archaeology, a tel is a hill formed from centuries of accumulated civilizations built upon the same site. Each generation leaves something........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)