Spinoza in Shtreimels: An Underground Seminar
A professor and three Hasidim walk into a bar—to study philosophy. True story.
Spy vs. Spy
Beginning in 1940 the French and the Zionists had a common enemy—the British.
Tough Bananas
A rags-to-riches tale with a machete-swinging Jewish hero.
Where Abraham Walked
Preserved for centuries by Syrian Christians, spoken-Aramaic is now breathing its last.
A Neoplatonic Affair
As the tapestry of Hillel Halkin's first novel unfurls, we see how perfectly each part fits into the larger pattern.
Are We All Protestants Now?
Leora Batnitzky's new book charts the development of modern Jewish thought.
Before the Big Bang
Cosmologist Lawrence Krauss is quite sure he knows how the universe began. Novelist Alan Lightman takes a wild narrative guess. But where does the Kabbalah stand?
Berdyczewski, Blasphemy, and Belief
Rabbi Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg, one of the towering figures of the rabbinical establishment, found deep lessons about faith in the writings of the Nietzschean heretic Micha Josef Berdyczewski.
Borges, the Jew
Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian Nobel Prize-winning writer was captivated by Judaism. In 1934, he lamented, "hope is dimming that I will ever be able to discover my link to the Table of the Breads and the Sea of Bronze; to Heine, Gleizer, and the ten Sephiroth; to Ecclesiastes and Chaplin."
Dust-to-Dust Song
Nelly Sachs was 50 years old when she fled the Nazis with her mother in 1940. Few would have perdicted that she would receive the Nobel Prize for Literature twenty-six years later.