Fictional Revisionism
The first time I picked up Joshua Cohen’s new novel, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, I put it down when I reached page eighty-four.
No Less Lost
The past can be exhilarating, and it can be quicksand. So discovers Menachem Kaiser in Plunder, his expansive, complicated, generous memoir.
Foundation Stone
The meshichists remove the covering from Schneerson's red velvet chair because he will be sitting on it during prayer; they gaze at the spot where he is believed to be stationed; and they call him up to the Torah for aliyot, parting ways to make room for him as he “walks” up to the bimah.
Even If the Ship Is Not Sinking
Some of the displaced persons who made their way from Germany to the new State of Israel felt more displaced in their new homeland than in the camps they left behind.
Heart Work
As a successful young novelist, my father had literary friends who now included Angus Wilson, Frederic Raphael, John Wain, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. All came to tea in my nursery. Stanley Moss, my godfather, went on to make a fortune from art dealing.
Letters, Summer 2021
Mitzvot and the Modern Dilemma; Tzuris Spoiled?; Hill 24’s Answer; Vilna Gaon, Zionist?
Memory Palace
“Dust comes from something. It shows something has happened, shows what has been disturbed or changed in the world. It marks time,” Edmund de Waal writes to the long-dead Moïse de Camondo.
Of Synagogues and Seinfeld
It's an interesting time to open a museum that argues for the interconnectedness of the Jewish world since it is virtually impossible for non-Israelis to enter the country.
Time and Ink: The Minimalist Devotions of Jacob El Hanani
The idea of a scribe who, like El Hanani, sets to work every day but never produces the same text twice—or never produces a legible text at all—would have appealed to Franz Kafka.
The Essence of Dignity
On Shabbos Nachamu in 1935, shortly before the Nuremberg Laws were promulgated, Rabbi Leo Baeck sent out a message of comfort to all Jewish communities and regional organizations throughout Germany,…