No Joke: Making Jewish Humor, the latest volume in the Library of Ideas series launched by Princeton University Press and the Tikvah Fund, includes dozens of jokes, classics and rarities.  Yet it is, by design, a grim read, and its examples of humor are little lights that flicker in the darkness.  For the real subject … Continue reading Taking Ourselves Seriously

I won’t do it anymore.  I won’t call Robert Whitehill-Bashan “the Hebrew poet from Texas.”  Yes, he did grow up in Texas in an assimilated Jewish family, and his willful and solitary acquisition of Hebrew, beginning in his teens, is something of a literary miracle.  And, yes, he is the one major American-born, American-residing Hebrew … Continue reading Tap Dancing Through Black Holes