Letters
Letters, Spring 2024
JRB Don't You Wonder? Anti-Israelism or Antisemitism? Good News from Sa'ad, and More
Reviews
This Great House
Israel's new National Library is the most architecturally exquisite building erected in the history of the Jewish State. Like its predecessor, it’s also an excellent place to “hock” about books and ideas.
Her Own Creation and Pure Luck
The fraught project of becoming an American pulses through Susan Rubine Suleiman’s memoir, along with the similarly fraught project of becoming an adult.
Od Tireh, Od Tireh . . .
The Hebrew Teacher is the first of Maya Arad’s acclaimed fictions to appear in English. It’s also surprisingly timely.
Imperial Rabbis
What, exactly, was Babylonian about the Babylonian Talmud and its sages?A new book by Simcha Gross suggests a radically new understanding.
What’s Love Got to Do with It?
Shai Held measures up the sprawling mass of Jewish tradition and claims, against both incredulous critics going back to Saint Paul, that love has a great deal to do with it.
Light and Darkness
A great novelist and close reader of Calvin, , Marilynne Robinson has now written a luminous commentary on Genesis.. But is her God more predictable than the God of Abraham?
Between Antisemites and Zionists: The Path of Alfred Wiener
Alfred Wiener had a good nose for racial hatred and an impressive capacity to size up the German organizations that were spewing it out after World War I.
Readings
You May View the Land from a Distance: Chaim Weizmann, May 1948
On the day the State of Israel declared independence, Chaim Weizmann lay ill and exhausted in a New York hotel room, waiting to hear if his rivals in Tel Aviv would recognize his achievements.
Homage to Orwell
George Orwell is best known for his antitotalitarian novels, but his true genius lay in the incomparably clear and urgent morality of his journalism. We could use some of that now.
The Arts
Kaddish for the Maestro
Maestro doesn't quite succeed at capturing the extraordinary life and genius of Leonard Bernstein, but it is an opportunity to recall an era in both American Jewish and musical history that will never be repeated.
Enlightenment and Conspiracy
What is surprising about the new anti-Zionist documentary Israelism, is not its historical distortions or its polemical tricks but the spiritual myth it constructs of its protagonists’ journey to enlightenment.
Shylock at the Barricades
The new production of The Merchant of Venice is both revolutionary and timely. It’s also deeply disappointing.
First Person
Second-Hand Jew: A Self-Portrait in Scenes
I took my first novel to Israel with me, and when a suitcase bomb exploded twenty meters away from me at the Munich airport, I shielded the manuscript with my body. My sister didn’t read it until just before I left. Then she said: “I thought Thomas Mann was dead. Anyway, if you ask me, he’s not a good example.”
Last Word
Like a Pharaoh
I had attended many Yiddish classes before, but not one in which I was the only Jew in the room.
Past Issues
Issue No. 56
Winter 2024
Issue No. 55
Fall 2023
Issue No. 54
Summer 2023
Issue No. 53