Letters
Letters, Fall 2023
A Question of Authority It’s inaccurate and fundamentally unfair to take the words of a character in a novel and attribute them to the author. Sadly, this is what Nadia…
Features
After the Fall
Who would have believed things could fall apart so quickly in Israel? And yet, Halkin writes, “I am in a way more hopeful than I was last December.”
Reviews
You Say You Want a Revelation
Who's afraid of biblical criticism?
Fruit of the Fall
The forbidden fruit has been said to be anything from a fig to a banana, so how did the world settle on an apple?
Mysterious Mishnah
According to a midrash, God will tell the contending nations: “He who possesses my mystery—he is my son.” And when they ask “What is your mystery?” God will reply, “It is the Mishnah.” How do you translate a mystery?
The Adjectival Liberal and The Kingship of God
Michael Walzer is one of our great defenders of liberal democracy, but does his vision exclude religious Jews?
Kidnapped!
When Ruth Blau met with Khomeini to secure the safety of Iranian Jews, it was only the latest extraordinary meeting for the fifty-seven year old Resistance spy turned convert turned kidnapper turned anti-Zionist turned Israeli agent.
Ruthless Cosmopolitans
Susan Sontag kept saying hello to George Steiner, louder and louder, as he stared out the bus window refusing to answer. More or less standard behavior for both of them . . .
Blessing and Rebuke
Orphaned and imprisoned by the Nazis, while never ceasing as a poet, Paul Celan knew what it was to sing “above, O above / the thorn.”
Memory and Terror
How does a survivor of an infamous hijacking piece together her history?
Readings
The Integralists and Us
A Jewish colleague once asked Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule, “In a fully Catholic polity, the sort you would like to bring about, what would happen to me, a Jew”? “Nothing bad,” Vermeule replied. OK, let’s see.
“I am an Object Loved by God”: Rereading Clarice Lispector
The great Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector rarely acknowledged her own Jewishness but when the Jornal do Brasil fired her a few days after the Yom Kippur War broke out, something changed.
The Arts
Intrigues and Tzuris
Have you seen the one about the Hasidic jewelers and the Albanian goons?
First Person
My Path in Jewish Studies: Memoirs of a Counter-Historian
When David Biale told Gershom Scholem that he wanted to work on the history of Jewish sexuality, the great sage of Jerusalem responded, "That's not a field!"
Last Word
Dateline Zion
Baruch Sterman and Judy Taubes Sterman
"Jewish law does not go forth from London, and so rabbinic authorities have long attempted to define a Jewish date line."
Past Issues
Issue No. 56
Winter 2024
Issue No. 55
Fall 2023
Issue No. 54
Summer 2023
Issue No. 53