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.”
On the Importance of Booing Mayne Yiddishe Mame
How did Zionist elites create a new national identity for rank and file members whose ideals did not match their own?
Ready to Wear
Textiles can tell the story of how modernity, for all its many blessings, often erases the practices and values of the collective, celebrating the individual at the expense of community and novelty or fashion at the expense of tradition.
The Exilarch’s Lost Princess
In real life, or as much of it as historians can reconstruct, Septimania was a name for the region of southern France that included the Jewish populations of such venerable cities as Carcassonne, Narbonne, and Toulouse. Jonathan Levi leans on the most delightfully far-fetched version of these events in his latest novel.