
Our Spring Issue
Our Spring 2021 issue arrives in mailboxes before Passover, just in time to enjoy Mark Anderson’s whimsical reimagining of what the exodus might have looked like for one of the “people of the book.” Our Passover focus continues with:
Daniel Gordis’s review of Natan Sharansky’s new memoir in which he discusses his special “personal Seder” and his literal redemption from the Gulag.
Jacob Howland’s discussion of Leon Kass’s new, long-awaited commentary on the book of Exodus.
An excerpt from Sholem Aleichem’s funny but forgotten serial novel Moshkeleh the Thief.
Stuart Halpern on how we’ve all been wrong about why we spill wine at the Seder.
Roslyn Weiss on the brilliant Passover sermon of Hasdai Crescas, the last great Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages.
With articles by
- Allan Arkush
- Benjamin Balint
- Allegra Goodman
- Jonathan Karp
- Gideon Katz
- Michal Leibowitz
- Julian Levinson
- Shai Secunda
- David J. Wolpe
plus Kathryn A. Glatter and Paul Finkelman on the genetic mutation that may have made Jews relatively immune to the Black Plague.

Life in Learning
The special relationship between Jews and learning has been endlessly documented. Yet these investigations have largely overlooked the textual communion that transubstantiates books and learning into the body and blood of Jewish experience.

Return without Returning
In Micah Goodman’s new book, The Wondering Jew, he argues that Israeli Jews should develop a relationship with Jewish tradition that falls somewhere between strict adherence and total abandonment.
The Last Word
“For each word a finger [goes] into the cup of wine and they spill out a drop, matching the sword of the Holy One, blessed be He, which has 16 sides,” Rabbi Eleazar of Worms (ca. 1176–1238) writes, based on a tradition from early Jewish mysticism.
- From Smitten with Sympathy
- by Stuart Halpern
- Issue Spring 2021

Time Ticks Away in Portugal
Tens of thousands of Jews made their way into Portugal in waves between the fall of France in 1940 and the end of World War II. The ordeals Marion Kaplan depicts were not terribly long, but to the people who endured them, they often seemed endless.
The Last Word
“For each word a finger [goes] into the cup of wine and they spill out a drop, matching the sword of the Holy One, blessed be He, which has 16 sides,” Rabbi Eleazar of Worms (ca. 1176–1238) writes, based on a tradition from early Jewish mysticism.
- From Smitten with Sympathy
- by Stuart Halpern
- Issue Spring 2021
Past Issues

Issue No. 45
Spring 2021

Issue No. 44
Winter 2021

Issue No. 43
Fall 2020

Issue No. 42