Posts
The Alter Rebbe
In Immanuel Etkes's new biography, we meet the young Shneur Zalman shortly after the death of his master Rabbi Dov Ber Friedman, known as the Maggid (or preacher) of Mezheritch in 1772.
The Hit Man
What music businessman Morris Levy craved even more than the recording artists themselves were the copyrights and catalogues the labels contained. “Copyrights don’t talk back,” he liked to say.
The Inklings
Leo Strauss may be as devastating as C. S. Lewis in his criticism of facile and destructive dogmas, but Hollywood isn’t planning a film version of Strauss’s Natural Right and History any time soon.
The Secrets of the Efod
How did it happen that some of the most brilliant anti-Christian polemics of the late Middle Ages were written by an (at least public) Christian?
A Dissonant Moses in Berlin and Paris
Schoenberg’s challenging opera is re-staged in 21st-century Europe.
A Fraternal Note
The poet James Reiss hears his older brother's voice again in a new translation of Reuven Ben-Yosef’s (born Robert Eliot Reiss) writing.
A Mechitza, the Mufti, and the Beginnings of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
In his new book, Hillel Cohen offers an analysis of the Arab-Jewish violence of 1929 that goes very much against the grain of the usual Zionist narrative and even the non-partisan historical research concerning this period.
As Though the Power of Speech Were an Ordinary Matter
Moods provides glimpses into Yoel Hoffmann’s life in literature and his ambivalence about the project of capturing life in words.
Chaos in the Wilderness
Unlike reporters who are happy to rework official government statements, Mohannad Sabry reports on the Sinai by drawing on a broad network of sources in the region.
Desert Wild
Zornberg’s sessions are deeply informed by traditional Jewish sources, especially the interpretations of classic rabbinic midrash and the homilies of Hasidic masters.