The Rogochover Speaks His Mind
After he visited the odd talmudic genius, Bialik said that “two Einsteins can be carved out of one Rogochover.”
The Wandering Reporter
Read 86 years after it was originally published, The Wandering Jew Has Arrived can be seen as a chilling and prophetic piece of historical reportage.
Theater and Politics in Oslo
Veteran Middle East negotiator Itamar Rabinovich gauges the distance between drama and diplomacy in his review of Oslo.
Why the Long Face?
David Grossman's newest novel, winner of the Man Booker International Prize, is an arresting, disturbing read with no obvious punch line but one long face.
A Life with Consequences
Yitzhak Rabin was a realist who saw peacemaking not as the source of security but as a further development that needed to be based upon security.
A Very Jewish Encounter
The text is full of underlining, circled words or phrases, arrows, careful cross references, and copious comments in Yiddish, English, Spanish, and Hebrew. It’s what my students at Ohio State might call an “extreme reading.”
Adventure Story
The story of Hebrew is a great story because there is nothing inevitable about it. Whether it was the period of the Bible or the Mishnah or Maimonides, there was always a danger, often the likelihood, that Hebrew would be lost in the break-up of great communities and subsequent migrations.
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?