Oberon’s Jewish Pedigree
How Shakespeare’s fairy king is descended from Judah Maccabee. Read the essay at Mosaic.
The Yale Fantasy of Leigh Bardugo
The setting for Leigh Bardugo’s acclaimed new fantasy novel ‘Ninth House’ is Yale, and it’s an unintentionally revealing look at …
The Sorry Significance of Susan Sontag
In a new biography, the critic emerges as an advanced exemplar of a nexus of glamor and moral self-regard. Read …
Zionavar
On the Jewish themes, characters, and subtexts of Guy Gavriel Kay. Read the essay at the Jewish Review of Books.
Simon Ings’s Brave Jew World
In the alternate history of The Smoke, Simon Ings maps sci-fi horror onto the Jews. Read the full review at …
Watching Game of Thrones, Waiting for Shavuot
On binge-watching and worlds without tradition. Read the full essay at the Jewish Review of Books.
The Middle Eastern Jews Who Were Some of Israel’s Earliest Undercover Spies
On a summer night in 1949, two men approached the Jordanian soldiers at a military post in the Old City …
The Last Unicorn as Post-Holocaust Fable
For six decades and counting, Peter S. Beagle has written fantasy literature with a Jewish-American sensibility. An overview of his …
Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of C. S. Lewis
Forty years ago, Harold Bloom published his bad fantasy novel The Flight to Lucifer. He claimed it was a product …
The 2,000-Year-Old Women
Two of the most highly praised novels of 2018, Dara Horn’s Eternal Life and Sarah Perry’s Melmoth, feature a Jewish woman born in …
Does a 350-page Comic Book About Herzl Avoid the Pitfalls of the Graphic Novel?
To answer that question means confronting some hard truths not only about Jewish graphic novels in particular but about graphic …
Best Books of 2018
My picks–a novel, a poem, and a history of American sci-fi–in good company. Read the full list chosen by Mosaic …
Of Were-Owls and Wandering Jews
My fantasy reading this month included Jewish shape-shifters and “Pharisees,” Michael Moorcock and Rudyard Kipling, and a new Israeli novel …
Why Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver is Bad Jewish Fantasy
Sure, all this beats a pogrom. But given that Novik clearly intends the book to work as a commentary on …
The First-Ever Anthology of Israeli Science Fiction and Fantasy
And how it compares with a Jewish American anthology. Read the full review at Mosaic.
Israelis in America
New books by Maya Arad and Galit Dahan Carlibach portray Israelis making their way as best they can in America …
How American Jews Came to Believe That Tikkun Olam Was at the Core of Their Tradition
Tikkun Olam’s easy path to enshrinement as the Jewish truth has depended on the widespread ignorance among millions of Jews …
My Funny Levantines
Two new novels offer angles of vision into Jewish experience in the (pre- or non-Israeli) parts of the modern Middle …
Literary Currency
Simplicity, in poetry, is complicated. How do we translate the poet Rahel for English language readers? Read the full essay …
Out-of-Body Experiences: Recent Israeli Science Fiction and Fantasy
“Common themes exist among some if not all of these books: the fluidity of identity in our social media world, …
