How Jews Were Modern
What’s a nice Jewish boy doing making bronze statues of tsars? And does it count as Jewish culture? Ahad Ha’am wanted to know and the Posen Foundation’s ambitious new survey raises the question afresh.
Persian Daughters of Israel
Leah Sarna imagines Jewish and Gentile women doing their laundry on the banks of the Tigris, sharing tricks for keeping their headscarves tied and their bedrooms pure. She reviews Shai Secunda’s new book on just how Babylonian the Babylonian Talmud was.
Orphan Soldiers
When WW II seemed all but lost, Britain knew that it had to take impossible risks, including turning Jewish refugees into crack commandos.
A Maimonides in Monsey
Maimonides’s only son, Abraham, fought to protect his father’s rationalist legacy. Now a direct descendant has republished his works, and a new Maimonidean controversy is percolating in “yeshivish” circles.
Ten Duel Commandments
Alexander Hamilton was, as the song goes, a “bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman.” Was he also a Jew? Well, he did go to Hebrew School in the West Indies, but ...
Letters, Fall 2021
We and I; It's a Novel: An Exchange
Sephardi Soap
With the runaway success of the novel The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, a television adaptation was all but inevitable, and the decision of Yes Studios to invest record amounts of cash in the show, while eyebrow raising, is also unsurprising.
It’s a Novel: An Exchange
A couple of weeks ago, Allan Arkush wrote that it was “hard to even list all the things . . . that ring false,” in Joshua Cohen’s widely praised new novel. The author vehemently defended himself on both literary and historical grounds against what he called “a review like a pogrom.”
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.