Family Secrets
“We beam with pleasure. We are in a place where our name is known. For both of us, this is astonishing. An absolute first.”
Ruth Gavison, 1945–2020
A leading Israeli legal scholar, public intellectual, and founding JRB editorial board member has passed away. Allan Arkush remembers her.
Camp Mountain Lake, 1977
The picture-taking began when he was still a little kid, at Camp Mountain Lake in North Carolina. The owners of the camp remember a chubby kid, not very athletic, and the camera was a way of making friends.
The Law of the Baby
Mara Benjamin provides a deeply philosophical account, in loving, sometimes humorous detail, of what it is like to live under the Law of the Baby—and uses it, together with incisive readings of classical Jewish texts, to explore the nature of obligation in Judaism.
“A Story of Commitment, Solidarity, Love Even”
Retracing her father’s wartime journey from Poland, across the USSR, through Iran and eventually to Palestine, Michal Dekel learns a lot about what it means to belong to a people.
The Milchik Way
Katchor seems to take his cue from these menus with their meandering columns of dense text; their indirection parallels and feeds his own.
Sundowning
In Morningstar Heights, Joshua Henkin tells his story simply and directly, with a narrative economy that conceals much close observation and human understanding. These have always been the strengths of his work, though they are not the qualities best rewarded in contemporary American fiction.
Not a Nice Boy
To every author who seemed too cautious—which was nearly every author he knew—Roth gave the same advice. “You are not a nice boy,” he told the British playwright David Hare. His friend Benjamin Taylor’s memoir is . . . nice.
Holiness and Public Policy: The Haredi Response to COVID-19
Bnei Brak, where yeshivot and synagogues were kept open far too long, accounted for 16 percent of all Israeli COVID-19 cases and a comparable percentage of fatalities despite comprising only 2 percent of the Israeli population. We haredim must radically rethink our approach to public policy—and holiness.
Letters, Summer 2020
Contradiction?, The Missing Poll, Golden Books, Heroic Acts, and More