Posts
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?
Letters, Spring 2024
JRB Don't You Wonder? Anti-Israelism or Antisemitism? Good News from Sa'ad, and More
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 incredulous critics going back to Saint Paul, that love has a great deal to do with it.
Like a Pharaoh
I had attended many Yiddish classes before, but not one in which I was the only Jew in the room.
Shylock at the Barricades
The new production of The Merchant of Venice is both revolutionary and timely. It’s also deeply disappointing.
Her Own Creation and Pure Luck
The fraught project of becoming an American pulses through Susan Rubin Suleiman’s memoir, along with the similarly fraught project of becoming an adult.
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.
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.