Second-Hand Jew: A Self-Portrait in Scenes
I took my first novel to Israel with me, and when a suitcase bomb exploded twenty meters away from me at the Munich airport, I shielded the manuscript with my body. My sister didn’t read it until just before I left. Then she said: “I thought Thomas Mann was dead. Anyway, if you ask me, he’s not a good example.”
This Great House
Israel's new National Library is the most architecturally exquisite building erected in the history of the Jewish State. Like its predecessor, it’s also an excellent place to “hock” about books and ideas.
Light and Darkness
A great novelist and close reader of Calvin, , Marilynne Robinson has now written a luminous commentary on Genesis.. But is her God more predictable than the God of Abraham?
Letters, Spring 2024
JRB Don't You Wonder? Anti-Israelism or Antisemitism? Good News from Sa'ad, and More
Imperial Rabbis
What, exactly, was Babylonian about the Babylonian Talmud and its sages?A new book by Simcha Gross suggests a radically new understanding.
What’s Love Got to Do with It?
Shai Held measures up the sprawling mass of Jewish tradition and claims, against incredulous critics going back to Saint Paul, that love has a great deal to do with it.
Like a Pharaoh
I had attended many Yiddish classes before, but not one in which I was the only Jew in the room.
Shylock at the Barricades
The new production of The Merchant of Venice is both revolutionary and timely. It’s also deeply disappointing.
Her Own Creation and Pure Luck
The fraught project of becoming an American pulses through Susan Rubin Suleiman’s memoir, along with the similarly fraught project of becoming an adult.
Between Antisemites and Zionists: The Path of Alfred Wiener
Alfred Wiener had a good nose for racial hatred and an impressive capacity to size up the German organizations that were spewing it out after World War I.