Ordinary Memory
“I wanted to write an integrated history,” Saul Friedländer told a magazine in 2007, in an interview marking the long-awaited concluding installment of his Holocaust study Nazi Germany and the Jews. By “integrated history,” Friedländer meant one in which the designs of genocidal perpetrators were fused with the personal testimony of the victims. “Business-as-usual history flattens the interpretation of mass…
Poems Like Mountains
“I was a year old,” Rivka Miriam says, “and my father would hold me in his arms and throw me up and down and I laughed and laughed and laughed. Each time he threw me up he’d yell in Yiddish ‘Rivkela Rivkela where’s Savta?’ ‘Killed.’ ‘Rivkela Rivkela where’s Miriam?’ ‘Killed.’ ‘Rivkela Rivkela where’s Chaim?’ ‘Killed.’ He’d say all the names…
Prospects for American Judaism
A new book traces the path of American Jews from participation to affiliation.
Requiem for a Luftmentsh
Were Saul Bellow and his friend Isaac Rosenfeld the last Jewish intellectuals of their kind?
The Idea of Abrahamic Religions: A Qualified Dissent
What is "Abrahamic" about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam?
Walking the Green Line
New books about the settlers and the settlements and depth and nuance to the discussions about their existence.
Welcome to the Jewish Review of Books
Welcome to the first issue of the Jewish Review of Books.
What the U.S. Can and Can’t Do in the Middle East
Why the realists are being unrealistic about American power in the Middle East.
Why There Is No Jewish Narnia
So why don’t Jews write more fantasy literature? And a different, deeper but related question: why are there no works of modern fantasy that are profoundly Jewish in the way that, say, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is Christian?
The Child Was Circumcised
The circumcision controversy in Germany has been heating up, but it's not the first time. The discussion has been going for centuries and has involved differing levels of overt anti-Semitism.