Big Tent
The American religious landscape that Uzi Rebhun sketches out in his new book, Jews and the American Religious Landscape, is marked by virtually boundless freedom and pluralism, as well as increasing fragmentation, due to the growth of “self-searching and religiosity by choice.”
Chaim Grade: A Testimony
Toward the end of his life, the talmudist Saul Lieberman published his only Yiddish essay, an appreciation for his friend, the novelist Chaim Grade, the great witness to a lost world. Translated and with an introduction by Allan Nadler.
From Hasidism to Marxism
The radical publisher Verso has re-issued Isaac Deutscher’s The Non-Jewish Jew: And Other Essays. But what is a “non-Jewish Jew”? And what was Deutscher?
Funny How a Poem Can Get Under Your Skin
On Celia Dropkin’s avant-garde Yiddish break-up poem and a political insight.
Homer of Lod: The Indispensability of Erez Bitton
The blind writer from Algeria is one of Israel’s most important voices, both in poetry and in policy.
Is Love Stronger than Death?
Near the outset of his book about mortality, Hillel Halkin has fallen into a grave, gazed at the remnants of a skull, succinctly described ancient Israelite burial practices, and vividly illustrated the ritual and material basis for that resonant biblical phrase in which the dead are “gathered to their ancestors.”
Letters, Spring 2017
Uninspired Cousins and Jewish Excellence, The Menorah and Its Flame, A Joke Retold, Romcom, and Remembering Salonica
Mystical Teachings Do Not Erase Sorrow
In Yehoshua November’s new collection, however, it turns out that the difficulties of being a Jewish poet do not primarily flow from being either Jewish or a poet but from the underlying difficulties of life itself.
Of Memory, History—and Eggplants
Tension between the quotidian on the one hand and an abiding reserve and unease on the other—is palpable throughout Saul Friedländer’s new memoir.
Of Spies and Centrifuges
Jay Solomon traces decades of spy games between the United States and Iran, a conflict, he writes, “played out covertly, in the shadows, and in ways most Americans never saw or comprehended.”