Zero-Sum Game
Most liberal Israelis once believed the 1990s-era Western narrative about Israeli-Palestinian peace: that the Palestinians would eventually be satisfied with a state alongside Israel, that everyone desired the same kind of progress, that maximalist rhetoric on the Arab side masked more modest goals, and that the Palestinian talk about millions of refugees and their “right of return” to Israel was a starting position that was bound to be bargained away.
The Yiddish-Speaking Hitmen’s Union
What are we to make of Szczepan Twardoch, a non-Jewish Pole who has written a crime novel featuring a volatile Jewish gangster who, among, many nefarious acts, slices and dices a fellow Jew?
And One for All
Adam Sutcliffe is an intellectual historian, not a theologian or a philosopher, so he doesn’t try to answer the question of what purpose Jews serve in the world, but he has a lot to say about the attempts to do so that Jews and non-Jews have been making for ages.
At Home in America
Just beneath the surface of this Holocaust memoir is, in fact, an altogether different tale: a paean to the good life in America.
Like Dreamers
How did a large number of religious Zionists come to believe a historical fantasy about the Vilna Gaon’s secret 18th-century Zionist plan?
Emancipation Terminable and Interminable
The modern "emancipation of the Jews" can be said to have begun a lot earlier than historians used to think, but has it really not come to its end?
Blood Delusion
While the blood libel was rooted in Christianity, it also accused Jews of practicing precisely the opposite of what Judaism itself teaches, namely, not to consume blood.
Letters, Winter 2021
Et Tu, Jewish Review?, The Akedah Conundrum, Crazy Rich Mizrachim?, Josephus’s Jonah, and More
Working One’s Way Out
"When I first read Winter Vigil over a year ago, I was swept away; I hadn’t read any contemporary writing as good in a long time. I hadn’t known Steve Kogan could write like that. I hadn’t, it turned out, known very much about him."
Blocked Desire
The Tunnel, A. B. Yehoshua’s most recent novel, written as he moved into his eighties, does not exhibit any traits of what some literary critics have called “the style of old age,” but its unusual subject, incipient dementia, is patently a concern of old age.