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?
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