Historical Agency
Among the many papers discovered in the Cairo Geniza are documents, including letters between Yeshua ben Ismail of Alexandria and Khalluf ben Musa in Qayrawan, in present-day Tunisia. The papers showing disintegration of their partnership shine a light on how a particular kind of business agreement affected the composition of a halakhic guidebook still widely consulted to this day.
Counting Jews
Tim Grady makes a careful but controversial case about the way Jews contributed to or supported Germany's worst excesses in World War I.
Digital Anti-Semitism: From Irony to Ideology
From tweeting trolls to digital incitement, a contemporary history.
Letters, Winter 2019
Was Newton a Magician?, Don't Forget Pumbedita!, Was Herzog Crazy?
Pittsburgh Jews, Squirrel Hill, and the Tree of Life
In the wake of the recent massacre, a local historian tells the story of the Pittsburgh Jewish community and the 154-year-old Tree of Life synagogue.
Robert Alter’s Bible: A Symposium
In the 14 years since he published the Five Books of Moses, Alter has steadily progressed through the Tanakh, producing translations that aim at something like a 21st-century American equivalent of what he has called the “simple yet grand” English of the King James Version, while attending closely to the literary techniques of the Hebrew text. We asked a learned, eclectic group of six critics to discuss the results.
Manufacturing Falsehoods
An immense echo-chamber has been built, and the line is always the same: Israel is not allowed to be a country like any other.
A Golem in Argentina
When an indigenous Argentine woman falls in love with a golem, her grandmother creates a love potion to win the golem’s (perhaps non-existent?) heart. What could possibly go wrong?
The Jewish Preview of Books—December 2018
Each month brings scores of new books of Jewish interest. Here are a few we can’t wait to read this December. And who knows, maybe you’ll find the perfect last-minute Hanukkah gift here as well!
In Memory of Judah Maccabee
That Judah, the great victor of the Hanukkah story, ultimately died fighting the Seleucids is something that surprisingly few Jews know. And were the Maccabees actually underdogs?