From Venice to Harlem
Faced with a bewildering variety of uses for the word “ghetto,” Daniel B. Schwartz performs marvels of clarification in steering the reader through the labyrinthian twists, turns, and hidden alleyways that mark this terminological odyssey.
Screwball Tragedy
Picture a Jewish town, located deep in a Polish forest, that hasn’t received so much as a postcard from the outside world in more than a century. Max Gross conjured it up The Lost Shtetl: A Novel, and the result is both screwball and serious.
Between Literalism and Liberalism
While literalism is intellectually untenable and liberalism is numerically imperiled, many Jews find that what they believe cannot be transmitted, and what can be effectively transmitted they cannot believe.
Return without Returning
In Micah Goodman’s new book, The Wondering Jew, he argues that Israeli Jews should develop a relationship with Jewish tradition that falls somewhere between strict adherence and total abandonment.
Life in Learning
The special relationship between Jews and learning has been endlessly documented. Yet these investigations have largely overlooked the textual communion that transubstantiates books and learning into the body and blood of Jewish experience.
Cynthia Ozick’s Art and Ardor
Reading is a blessing and a curse in Ozick’s world, a gateway to heightened emotion and new experience and also a maze of cruel tricks and dead ends. Allegra Goodman reviews her latest novel.
In the Beginning, There Was Angst
Where a committed secularist would raise up the literary in place of the sacred, Adam Kirsch’s discussions in The Blessing and the Curse read more like a coda to the sacred scriptures.
Sharansky’s Exodus
Witnessing the modern exodus of Jews from Ethiopia to Israel—different than his own but no less stirring—reminded Sharansky of what he’d told himself in his darkest days in prison: “Your history did not begin with your birth or with the birth of the Soviet regime. You are continuing an exodus that began in Egypt. History is with you.”
Letters, Spring 2021
Of Ballads and Baloney, The Singer or the Song?, The American Question, Against Artichokes, and More
All-American Esther
Stuart Halpern’s anthology Esther in America tells the story of the surprising uses to which the story of Purim has been put in American history.