An Israeli Writer’s Great American Novel
Israeli reviewers have repeatedly invoked the word “ambitious” to describe Reuven Namdar’s Hebrew novel, Habayit asher neḥerav (“The House That Was …
The Russians Have Pushkin, the Jews Have Bialik
A powerful new film, available online, shows us the man who more than any other shaped the modern Hebrew language. A …
Patrick Modiano’s (Jewish?) Sorrow
In awarding the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature to Patrick Modiano, a French novelist whose father was Jewish, did the …
Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist
For anyone interested in modern Israel, Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a …
Why Are Jews Conservative?
“We Jews are so smart, just give us five or ten years and the most prominent American conservatives will be …
Meet the New Weird
Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy of sci-fi / horror novels is contemporary, in some ways even trendy. The cast of …
A British Eyewitness to Israel’s Birth
This is Jerusalem in every Man, A Tent & Tabernacle of Mutual Forgiveness, Male & Female Clothings. And Jerusalem is …
Bialik’s “To the Bird”
“El-hatsipor” (To the Bird) was Chaim Nachman Bialik’s first published poem. He began its composition while he was still a …
Max and Mirra, Edo and Enam
The true story of Max Eitingon is still being written. A member of Sigmund Freud’s inner circle and financial supporter …
The Story of the Oy
I like the way Tamara Faith Berger writes sex, although the sex she writes is always of the glowering, desperate …
Ivanhoe and Jewish Politics
I have fond if vague memories of the 1952 film “Ivanhoe,” with Elizabeth Taylor in the role of Rebecca, and which …
The Once and Future Jews of Dan Simmons
Science fiction writer Dan Simmons is the author of more than two dozen novels. Not all of them are science …
Still Finding Vivian Maier
Tonight I saw the Vivian Maier documentary. The film is fascinating, extremely well made, and decidedly worth seeing, if ultimately …
Róźycki’s Colonies
The poet devours God in “Ants and Sharks,” the twenty-sixth poem in Tomasz Róźycki’s sonnet sequence Colonies, displacing God at …
Tevye’s Secret
Tevye is Sholem Aleichem’s most beloved character and the Tevye stories his most widely acclaimed literary works. A good deal …
Culture and the Classroom
Programs of Jewish studies in colleges and universities have added greatly to the possibilities for Jewish self-understanding. But they offer …
Post-Protestant–Catholic–Jew
Impressionistic, idiosyncratic, Joseph Bottum’s An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America swoops and veers like the …
Historical Revisionism is Hell
Mary Louise Roberts, a scholar at the University of Wisconsin who has focused on “issues of gender in fin-de-siècle France,” …
Rafik Schami and the Dark Side of Syria
One could do worse, in trying to gain some perspective on the bloodbath that is Syria, than read Rafik Schami’s …
The End of Eros
In the Roman empire, slaves and prostitutes “played something like the part that masturbation has played in most cultures,” writes …
