Jewish Review of Books

Not a Nice Boy

To every author who seemed too cautious—which was nearly every author he knew—Roth gave the same advice. “You are not a nice boy,” he told the British playwright David Hare. His friend Benjamin Taylor’s memoir is . . . nice.

Holiness and Public Policy: The Haredi Response to COVID-19

Yehoshua Pfeffer

Bnei Brak, where yeshivot and synagogues were kept open far too long, accounted for 16 percent of all Israeli COVID-19 cases and a comparable percentage of fatalities despite comprising only 2 percent of the Israeli population. We haredim must radically rethink our approach to public policy—and holiness.

The Milchik Way

Jenna Weissman Joselit

Katchor seems to take his cue from these menus with their meandering columns of dense text; their indirection parallels and feeds his own.

(Almost) People

Shai Secunda

What does it mean to say that books have lives?

A Plague on the Shores of the Sea of Galilee

Yitzhak Y. Melamed

The death of the Great Maggid in December 1772, a week before Hanukkah, was a crucial moment in the early history of Hasidic movement.

The Law of the Baby

Barbara U. Meyer

Mara Benjamin provides a deeply philosophical account, in loving, sometimes humorous detail, of what it is like to live under the Law of the Baby—and uses it, together with incisive readings of classical Jewish texts, to explore the nature of obligation in Judaism.

The Last Word

“Are you really intending to raise our kids,” my wife Tali asked me one Saturday afternoon after our Shabbes lunch, “in a world that doesn’t have Harry Potter in Yiddish?”

From If God Wills It, a Broom Can Shoot
by Arun Viswanath
Issue Summer 2020

The Last Word

“Are you really intending to raise our kids,” my wife Tali asked me one Saturday afternoon after our Shabbes lunch, “in a world that doesn’t have Harry Potter in Yiddish?”