Fall 2021

Letters, Fall 2021

We and I; It's a Novel: An Exchange

Ten Duel Commandments

Adam Kirsch

Alexander Hamilton was, as the song goes, a “bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman.” Was he also a Jew? Well, he did go to Hebrew School in the West Indies, but ...

From Pittsburgh to the Holocaust

Jonathan D. Sarna

Journalist Mark Oppenheimer visited Pittsburgh thirty-two times and conducted 250 interviews to get the story of the Tree of Life massacre right. “Years from now,” Jonathan Sarna writes, “when people want to know what happened … this is the book to which they will probably turn.”

A Maimonides in Monsey

David S. Farkas

Maimonides’s only son, Abraham, fought to protect his father’s rationalist legacy. Now a direct descendant has republished his works, and a new Maimonidean controversy is percolating in “yeshivish” circles.

Orphan Soldiers

A.E. Smith

When WW II seemed all but lost, Britain knew that it had to take impossible risks, including turning Jewish refugees into crack commandos.

Persian Daughters of Israel

Leah Sarna

Leah Sarna imagines Jewish and Gentile women doing their laundry on the banks of the Tigris, sharing tricks for keeping their headscarves tied and their bedrooms pure. She reviews Shai Secunda’s new book on just how Babylonian the Babylonian Talmud was.

How Jews Were Modern

Allan Arkush

What’s a nice Jewish boy doing making bronze statues of tsars? And does it count as Jewish culture? Ahad Ha’am wanted to know and the Posen Foundation’s ambitious new survey raises the question afresh.

A Tale of Two Exiles

Ethan Katz

What did a seditious Sicilian duchess and the heretical son of a chief rabbi have to do with the beginnings of French antisemitism?

The First Lady of Zionism

Jenna Weissman Joselit

At the age when most of us are just about to fold our tents, Henrietta Szold, pitched hers—and in the Holy Land, no less.

The Russian Joseph

Gary Saul Morson

Osip Mandelstam thought being a writer in the Soviet Union was “incompatible with the honorable title of Jew.” Stalin didn’t like Jewish writers in general and disliked the poem about his “cockroach mustache” in particular.

Between Frankfurt and Jerusalem: Scholem, Adorno, and the Fate of the Sacred

Benjamin Balint

When the philosopher Theodor Adorno met Gershom Scholem, he thought that he “gave the impression of a Bedouin prince.” Their lifetime of letters orbits their shared love of their brilliant, doomed friend Walter Benjamin.

Fatal Attraction

Steven E. Aschheim

Although Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and never forthrightly repented of the episode “no other philosopher had more impact on twentieth-century European Jewish thought.”

Do Jews Count?

Dara Horn

I would never have said this ten years ago, or even five years ago, but there apparently comes a time in the lives of those who write about Jewish identity when they have to decide whether to write about . . . it.

The Danish Prince and the Israelite Preacher

Noah Millman

Hamlet, Shakespeare’s most peculiar tragedy, echoes one of the most peculiar books in the Hebrew Bible, Ecclesiastes. It also helps us understand its wisdom.

On Chaim Grade’s Agunah

Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt

Chaim Grade’s Yiddish novel The Agunah is not so much a story about one woman’s plight as much as a whole city’s eruption over her story—the rabbis, the butchers, the mohels, the barbers, the housewives.

Cultural Life in the Vilna Ghetto

Abraham Sutzkever, Justin Cammy

The great poet Abraham Sutzkever once swore an oath to serve Yiddish culture. He fulfilled his vow in ways no one could have ever imagined.

Depths of Devotion

Stuart Halpern

Aldous Huxley wrote a poem where Jonah was “seated upon the convex mound of one vast kidney” of the fish that swallowed him, while George Orwell gave an interpretation of the Bible story in a review of Henry Miller. Read Stuart Halpern’s romp through Jonah’s reception history.