A Brand Rescued from the Fire
Leon Chameides has painstakingly collected his father’s writings from the fateful years of 1930s Polish Jewry, before the break-up of his family and the collapse of Jewish life in Nazi Europe.
A Foreign Song I Learned in Utah
Despite all of Bob Dylan’s subterfuges, disguises, and costume changes, he really was a child of the American heartland. Winning the Nobel Prize might actually be his most Jewish achievement.
Back in the USSR
On the ephemeral nature of home and “certificates of cowlessness” in Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region.
Bling and Beauty: Jerusalem at the Met
In a new exhibit at the Met curators Barbara Drake Boehm and Melanie Holcomb wear their liberal hearts on their sleeves, imagining that Jerusalem's crowds might yet be resurrected as a convivial medieval pluralism.
Brave New Golems
As monsters go, golems are pretty boring. Mute, crudely fashioned household servants and protectors, in essence they’re not much different from the brooms in the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” story.
Ike’s Bet and Nasser’s Vasser
Could the hot dog-munching, movie-going young colonel named Nasser have become our man if we had tried harder to accommodate him at the very outset?
Jokes: A Genre of Thought
Three people are required to perfect a joke: one to tell it, one to get it, and a third not to get it.
Letters, Winter 2017
Critical Powers, Pity the Poor Irisher, Evil Inkblots, Theologico-Political Query, Funny but Serious, A Day at the Races
Memory and Desecration in Salonica
Memory and a vandalized memorial in a once-Jewish city on the Aegean Sea.
Our Kind of Traitor
More than 40 years after the Yom Kippur War, some of its battles rage on, including the debate over the spy Ashraf Marwan’s true loyalty.