Learning Yiddish After 60
When I was about 10, I had a brilliant idea. If my parents would agree to speak only Yiddish with each other, it would just come to me without effort. I wouldn't have to learn it or study it, I would just wake up one day knowing it.
“Love Between Writers”: Saul Bellow and Bette Howland
“I thought you knew that I belonged to the Truth Party too,” Bette Howland wrote her fellow novelist, mentor, and sometime lover, Saul Bellow. Her son recently found a new cache of letters between them that illuminates two brilliant artists at work.
In Pursuit of Wholeness: The Book of Ruth in Modern Literature
While not the most dramatic of all the biblical stories, the quietly moving book of Ruth, which we read on Shavuot, continues to resonate in Western literature.
Revisiting Herman Wouk’s City Boy
Remembering Herman Wouk's "gentle mockery at the shopworn pretensions of bohemian poseurs and ethnic Jews passing as nonhyphenated Americans."
Getting Along with the Gentiles
From the Brandeis Book Stall to the sands of Iwo Jima (and halakhic flexibility).
Watching Game of Thrones, Waiting for Shavuot
Binge-watching the traditionless Game of Thrones while looking forward to the traditional binge-learning of Shavuot.
Moses and Hellenism
In a provocative new work recently published in German, Bernd Witte proposes nothing less than an “alternative history of German culture,” as the subtitle of his finely wrought work of scholarship tells us. Moses and Homer: Greeks, Jews, Germans is a historical and cultural argument animated by powerful indignation. This history, he insists, has yet to be fully confronted.
Pop Toys and Power Politics: Israel and the Eurovision Song Contest
Eurovision is Israel's chance to shine on the world stage for something other than the Palestinian conflict, but Hamas and PIJ found the song contest an all-too-tempting target.
Instagramming the Holocaust
This Holocaust Memorial Day, an online project known as Eva’s Stories is uploading snippets of video every 30 minutes to the @eva.stories Instagram page.
Redemption in Catalonia and Bosnia: The Sarajevo Haggadah
What does the most celebrated haggadah in the world tell us about exile and redemption?