Andrew Silow-Carroll, JTA

Before the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that it would honor fashion designer John Galliano with a major Costume Institute exhibition next spring, the museum convened at least two unusual meetings: a face-to-face with Galliano and a number of prominent rabbis, and a larger meeting with the recently retired Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, museum officials and several prominent Jewish leaders.

The Jewish Theological Seminary has named Rabbi Mike Uram as its next chancellor, elevating a Jewish educator best known for his time as executive director of the University of Pennsylvania Hillel.

Under liberal Zionism, support for Israel was based on a commitment to Jewish self-determination anchored in democracy, and animated by the promise of peace with the Palestinians. On Jan. 6 in Manhattan, rabbis and Jewish thinkers gathered to ask whether liberal Zionism is collapsing.

I remember being freaked out, and fascinated, by my parents’ copy of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales. It featured these especially lurid illustrations; I can still see a little girl in a red coat, trapped in a spider’s web and tormented by lizards, bats and a huge black spider with a skull and crossbones on its head. I didn’t know then that this was the work of Arthur Szyk, a Polish-born Jew who was famous for his vivid and grotesque caricatures of Nazi and Japanese leaders and his heroic depictions of American soldiers and the country’s founding fathers.

Jonathan Sarna, historian of American Jewry — a bridge between academia and Jewish community — author of Pork on a fork, When Grant expelled the Jews, set to retire.