Our Spring Issue Cover

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.

Read It Now

Life in Learning

Life in Learning

Shai Secunda

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

Return without Returning

Gideon Katz

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.

Time Ticks Away in Portugal

Time Ticks Away in Portugal

Allan Arkush

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.

Past Issues