Why the Long Face?
David Grossman's newest novel, winner of the Man Booker International Prize, is an arresting, disturbing read with no obvious punch line but one long face.
Theater and Politics in Oslo
Veteran Middle East negotiator Itamar Rabinovich gauges the distance between drama and diplomacy in his review of Oslo.
Homer of Lod
Erez Bitton, the blind writer from Algeria, is one of Israel’s most important voices, both in poetry and in policy.
Reviews
The Exilarch’s Lost Princess
In real life, or as much of it as historians can reconstruct, Septimania was a name for the region of southern France that included the Jewish populations of such venerable cities as Carcassonne, Narbonne, and Toulouse. Jonathan Levi leans on the most delightfully far-fetched version of these events in his latest novel.
Reviews
Of Memory, History—and Eggplants
Tension between the quotidian on the one hand and an abiding reserve and unease on the other—is palpable throughout Saul Friedländer’s new memoir.
The Arts
Ready to Wear
Textiles can tell the story of how modernity, for all its many blessings, often erases the practices and values of the collective, celebrating the individual at the expense of community and novelty or fashion at the expense of tradition.
The Last Word
The text is full of underlining, circled words or phrases, arrows, careful cross references, and copious comments in Yiddish, English, Spanish, and Hebrew.
From A Very Jewish Encounter by Matt Goldish | Spring 2017
Funny How a Poem Can Get Under Your Skin
On Celia Dropkin’s avant-garde Yiddish break-up poem and a political insight.
