Setting the Table
“How will women’s proficiency in learning change family dynamics? . . . How will their sons view a woman’s capacity for rigorous study? Will women want a different sort of husband—one who is not threatened or intimated by an educated woman?”
Rocketmen
A brilliant and moving exhibit at the Israel Museum pairs the Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, who died in the space shuttle Columbia explosion, with the obscure biblical gure Enoch, who was also an astronaut of sorts.
Letters, Fall 2019
Austro-Hungarian Eden?; The Diaspora Strikes Back!; In Performance There Is Problem; Tact, Truth, and Tercets; Mameloshn
In and Out of Time
A new collection of Heschel's writings plucked from obscurity and presented with clarity to English readers adds to our understanding of the centrality of time in Heschel’s worldview.
The Gray Lady and the Jewish State
Jerold Auerbach’s archly titled new study Print to Fit: The New York Times, Zionism and Israel, 1896–2016 is a well-researched and, for the most part, damning brief of the Times’s news coverage and editorial attitudes toward Zionism and Israel for over a century.
Mastering the Return
Embedding biblical allusions in her descriptions of pagan practices, Tova Reich in her new novel seems to suggest that the world is so entangled that there is no space between the sacred and profane.
Jews Not without Money
Jews, Money, Myth, at London's Jewish Museum, normalizes the Jewish relationship with money without negating those factors that made this particular historical association especially fraught.
The Zionavar Tapestry
Canadian fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay weaves unique novels with Jewish themes but never quite escapes Tolkien's orbit.
Unquiet Ghosts of the Ghetto
As we mark the 80th anniversary of the fall of Poland to the Germans in World War II, a new documentary gives a glimpse inside the Warsaw Ghetto.
Agnon, Oz, and Me
Over the years, I’ve spoken privately with several Israeli novelists but with only two of the internationally famous ones. And these very brief conversations took place more than 40 years…