A Spy’s Life
Sylvia Rafael: The Life and Death of a Mossad Spy opens not with an intrepid secret agent about to pull off a bold maneuver, as books with such titles usually do, but with nine men gathered around a table in 1977, studying a picture of an Israeli agent.
An Affair as We Don’t Know It
Harris retells the “Dreyfus Affair” from Lieutenant-Colonel Marie-Georges Picquart’s point of view, dramatically reconstructing how he zeroed in on the true culprit.
Climate of Opinion
Academic scholars, of all people, should recognize that excoriation is not an acceptable substitute for argument, but, in fact, it pervades much of the discourse that today passes as “criticism of Israel.”
Coming with a Lampoon
Jacobson is a world master of the art of disturbing comedy and each new work of his advances the genre—his latest one by a giant step.
Drawing Conclusions: Joann Sfar and the Jews of France
The great French comic artist is now working at the height of his considerable powers, and he is obsessed with questions of Jewish identity and life in Europe.
Going Under with Klinghoffer
When it came to New York’s Metropolitan Opera this past fall The Death of Klinghoffer faced angry—and, it must be admitted, some pretty shrill—demonstrators.
High Fives
The JRB editors celebrate our fifth anniversary with our top-five book lists.
Jewish Geography
The Jewish peddler, the “slave of the basket or the pack; then the lackey of the horse,” did not have an easy time of it.
Lands of the Free
It is sad to watch the territorialists engage in their wild goose chases all over the globe at a time when multitudes of Jews were in need of a place, any place, to go.
Letters, Spring 2015
Stubborn Soul, Animal or Vegetable?, Life and Literature, David and Goliath