The Book of Radiance
Daniel Matt’s massive new English edition of the Zohar is not only a great translation, it is also one of the great commentaries on the classic work of Jewish mysticism.
Reviews
Man of Letters
Adam Kirsch’s judicious selection of Lionel Trilling’s letters throws instructive light on both Trilling’s life and American intellectual culture from the 1920s to the 1970s.
Reviews
Mending Walls
Yoram Hazony's The Virtue of Nationalism is a brilliant achievement, at once learned and sharp, philosophical and politically engaged. It is also sure to be controversial.
Reviews
A Normal Israel?
Zionism has long based its claim to sovereignty on the universal right to national self-determination, and the phrase “like all other nations” has been incorporated into Israel’s Declaration of Independence, yet the goal of “normalization” has proven to be much more complicated than most early Zionists had thought.
Lost & Found
The Rebbe and the Professor
After the war, the great Jewish historian Salo Baron wrote to Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, for help with his work on the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction. As Hannah Arendt suggested in a side note to Baron, the commission probably wasn't “kosher” enough for Schneersohn, but their exchange illuminates a dark historical moment.
The Last Word
"A man, having gone insane, regains control of his mind by writing letters—‘to the newspapers,’ Saul Bellow writes in Herzog, ‘to people in public life, to friends and relatives and at last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally the famous dead.’”
From Tweets and Bellows by Rich Cohen | Fall 2018
After the revolution, Marc Chagall—somewhat implausibly—became plenipotentiary for the affairs of art in the province of Vitebsk. Against all probability, the avant-garde bloomed in a provincial Russian city dominated by Jewish culture.
