commentary

Why are Jewish children’s books so bad? Anyone seeking a perfect metaphor for the limitations of Jewish children’s literature will find …

The stubborn American Jewish refusal to treat Hebrew as a language that can be learned, spoken, and used is nothing …

Dan Burt’s memoir of Jewish Philadelphia in the 1940s and 50s is a tale of immigrants, brawlers, cops, and crooks. …

Eric Cohen’s call for “a new Jewish conservatism” is constructive and forward-looking, which is as it should be. While it …

On March 19, 2012, a French jihadi on a shooting spree targeted a Jewish school in Toulouse, murdering three children …

For anyone interested in modern Israel, Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a …

Tonight I saw the Vivian Maier documentary. The film is fascinating, extremely well made, and decidedly worth seeing, if ultimately …

Programs of Jewish studies in colleges and universities have added greatly to the possibilities for Jewish self-understanding. But they offer …

Impressionistic, idiosyncratic, Joseph Bottum’s An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America swoops and veers like the …

Mary Louise Roberts, a scholar at the University of Wisconsin who has focused on “issues of gender in fin-de-siècle France,” …

Last month, David Myers, professor of Jewish history at UCLA, published an interesting essay in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal …

Joanna Chen’s essay on Israeli poet Agi Mishol in the usually excellent Los Angeles Review of Books is an unfortunate snooze. Chen, …

I just read Joseph Braude’s excellent review of Reuven Snir’s enticing anthology of Baghdad poems, which I reviewed last month. …

The Tikvah Fund website republishes Jonathan Yudelman’s essay from the February issue of First Things about Marcel Dubois, the French-born …

I loved the first Peter Jackson Hobbit film, and if I am cooler now towards his three amazing Lord of …