Michal Leibowitz
Tradition and Imagination
Jewish fiction’s long memory.
Godly Guardrails and Secular Assumptions
Ilana M. Horwitz convincingly argues that religious students are high achievers. But what’s the special sauce that makes it so, and who gets to decide what counts as an achievement?
An Indian Play in Warsaw
Janusz Korczak couldn’t save any of his beloved orphans from the Nazis. Jai Chakrabarti imagines one, and sends him to India. It’s a great premise, but does it work as a novel?
Screwball Tragedy
Picture a Jewish town, located deep in a Polish forest, that hasn’t received so much as a postcard from the outside world in more than a century. Max Gross conjured it up The Lost Shtetl: A Novel, and the result is both screwball and serious.
Miami Vices
As it is, The Orchard reads more like Days of Our Lives than Daniel Deronda.
American Gods
One need not buy into the cultural importance of “Snapewives” to accept that the digital age is one in which individuals demand narratives, practices, and communities they find personally meaningful.
Double Lifers
In 2006, a blogger known as Baal Habos posted about a former rebbe who had once compared heretical media to “a hole in the head.” By then he had become a “ba’al ha-bos” (roughly, a family man), with a position in the community he wasn’t comfortable giving up, he had acquired plenty of holes in his head and wanted to discuss them—anonymously.