Next Year on the Rhine
Like Newport, Rhode Island, Worms, Germany is the quiet, waterside home to its country's most venerable synagogue—but the similarities stop there.
Quibbles
Harry Wolfson, Reinhold Niebuhr, and chutzpah.
Red Rosa
A newly published collection of letters shows a new, softer side of Rosa Luxemburg.
The Audacity of Faith
The career and life of Yehuda Amital—unconventional, unpredictable, and free of clichés.
The Birthright Challenge
Eleven years and four books on, can Birthright Israel save diaspora Judaism?
The Nation of Israel?
The case for an Israeli—not Jewish—republic.
The Rebbe and the Yak
What do you do when your ancestor appears to you in a dream saying that he is trapped inside the body of a Tibetan yak? If you're the Ustiler Rebbe in Haim Be'er's new novel, you go to Tibet to find him, of course.
What Is a Jew? The Answer of the Maccabees
In 1958, David Ben-Gurion sent a letter to fifty Jewish leaders around the world, asking, "Who is a Jew?" He had good political reasons to launch such an inquiry, and equally good reasons to expect answers or attempts at answers. Isaiah Berlin wrote back, and so did the Jewish scholar Alexander Altmann, the novelist S.Y. Agnon, and the Lubavitcher Rebbe, as well as many others. But Abba Hillel Silver, the prominent Reform rabbi and American Zionist leader who had represented the Jewish Agency before the United Nations a decade earlier, did not respond to Ben-Gurion's missive—not directly, anyhow.
Yo’s Blues
For Israeli artist Yoram Kaniuk, the bohemian world of Billie Holiday, Marlon Brando, and James Agee had a lot to offer, but not enough.
Brother Daniel, Sister Ulitskaya
Ludmila Ulitskaya's fictionalized version of the Brother Daniel case asks us all to turn the other cheek.