Letters

Features

Drowning in the Red Sea

Ruth R. Wisse

Gennady Estraikh said, "It is hardly an overstatement to define Yiddish literature of the 1920s as the most pro-Soviet literature in the world." When Arab riots killed 400 Jews in Palestine in late August 1929, the Yiddish communist press found itself torn between sympathy for the fallen and loyalty to the Revolution.

The Rebbe and the Yak

Alan Mintz

What do you do when your ancestor appears to you in a dream saying that he is trapped inside the body of a Tibetan yak? If you're the Ustiler Rebbe in Haim Be'er's new novel, you go to Tibet to find him, of course.

Reviews

Next Year on the Rhine

Allan Arkush

Like Newport, Rhode Island, Worms, Germany is the quiet, waterside home to its country's most venerable synagogue—but the similarities stop there.

Minhag America

Riv-Ellen Prell

Since the founding of the United States, the American "synagoguge" has survived as a flexible institution—some would argue, too flexible.

Red Rosa

Adam Kirsch

A newly published collection of letters shows a new, softer side of Rosa Luxemburg.

Readings

The Arts

Yo’s Blues

Eitan Kensky

For Israeli artist Yoram Kaniuk, the bohemian world of Billie Holiday, Marlon Brando, and James Agee had a lot to offer, but not enough.

Freedom Riders

Esther Schor

There is nothing subtle about the theme that runs throughout Philadelphia's National Museum of American Jewish History.

Marginalia

Elli Fischer, Shai Secunda

Israeli director Joseph Cedar's new film Footnote was anything but that at the Cannes Film Festival, despite its setting in the Hebrew University Talmud department.

Lost & Found

What Is a Jew? The Answer of the Maccabees

Abba Hillel Silver, Ofer Schiff

In 1958, David Ben-Gurion sent a letter to fifty Jewish leaders around the world, asking, "Who is a Jew?" He had good political reasons to launch such an inquiry, and equally good reasons to expect answers or attempts at answers. Isaiah Berlin wrote back, and so did the Jewish scholar Alexander Altmann, the novelist S.Y. Agnon, and the Lubavitcher Rebbe, as well as many others. But Abba Hillel Silver, the prominent Reform rabbi and American Zionist leader who had represented the Jewish Agency before the United Nations a decade earlier, did not respond to Ben-Gurion's missive—not directly, anyhow.

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