Revisiting Hill 24
The first movie I ever saw, not counting Dumbo, was Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer, a landmark black-and-white film about Israel’s War of Independence . . .
Let the People of Israel Remember
The earliest literary commemoration of Zionism’s fallen heroes was a book entitled Yizkor, published in Palestine in 1911 by members of Poalei Zion (Workers of Zion).
Fog
Every spring for the last ten years, a fog has crept over Haim Watzman's life. It begins to dissipate on Yom Hazikaron, Israel's memorial day.
Samson Raphael Hirsch’s Attack on Liberal Christian Bigotry and American Slavery
In 1841, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch leapt into a raging debate between liberal and orthodox Protestants, declaring, “It is high time for the non-Jewish thinker to set aside convenient pre-judgements and to begin to construct Christendom without having to destroy Judaism.”
A Season of Tzuris: The Shtisels Return
In Season 3 of the hit Netflix show, the Shtisels reckon with an endless procession of trials and tribulations, from the perils of courtship to the strains of fraying marriages.
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 by every-one from crypto-Jews and Cotton Mather to Sojourner Truth and the organizers of the Queen Esther Beauty Contest.
Bread and Vodka
Mendel Osherowitch's 1933 book about life in Ukraine not only bore rare eyewitness testimony to one of the worst atrocities in a barbarous century; it did so from the vantage point of a brother of two of the perpetrators.
Infinite Mirrors
Nicole Krauss’s frequent philosophical turns are often compelling without being entirely clear.
Radical Kindness and Heroic Dogs: A New Anthology of Yiddish Children’s Literature
Honey on the Page, like the best anthologies, is an eye-opening work of literary history, gleefully introducing a sea of lightly known authors through both their work and through meticulously crafted biographical sketches.
A Sharp Word
From his intensive study of Hebrew and Jewish history to a surprisingly romantic Zionist congress in Basel, and the horrors of the Kishinev Pogrom, 1903 seems to have been a turning point for the young Jabotinsky.