Exodus and Egyptology
The Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel shows why the plagues were chosen and how the Israelites sang at the reed sea.
Ba’al Teshuvah Poetics
Part of being a ba’al teshuvah is the yearning to stop being one—to finally blend with those who never had to return because they never left.
Golden Books
Three decades ago, Allan Nadler went to Vilna to reclaim books that the Nazis had plundered from YIVO, or so he thought. Dan Rabinowitz’s Lost Library solves the mystery—and raises important questions.
History with a Flourish
So much gets lost in translation—and to history—when household items, heavy with use, first assume the status of heirlooms and then land in museum vitrines, heralded as art rather than history.
Lawrence of Judea: T. E. Lawrence and the Deal of the Twentieth Century
"It is essential that [the Jewish community] should know that it is in Palestine as of right and not on sufferance." —Winston Churchill
Super Stan
Even in comparison with so many other contributions to American popular culture and entertainment, comic books are an especially Jewish story.
The Lost Voices of Salonica
Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s prodigious research, a true labor of love, gives voice to the long-silenced Salonican Jews.
The Way We Live Now
One uncanny thing about this moment is that no one has yet put the experience we are all having—collectively yet separately, sometimes on Zoom—into articulate words.
Thoreau and the Jewish Problem
When my friend and I read Walden, I shuttle between my old paperback, festooned with underlining and marginalia, and Jeffrey S. Cramer’s handsome annotated edition.
The Play’s the Thing: A Revolutionary New Haggadah
The exodus from Egyptian bondage was a good thing. What about a haggadah that is "unbound"