Spring 2020

Letters, Spring 2020

A Kind of Conversation?, Law and Love, Kosher for Passover!, and Deep Rivers

A Decade of Recommendations

In celebration of our 10th anniversary, we asked 10 of our favorite readers which books they had found themselves recommending the most over the last decade.

Inerrant or Oblique?

Robert Alter

John Barton has written a wonderful book about the Bible for believers and nonbelievers alike.

Indispensable Man

Anita Shapira

In his effort to cut David Ben-Gurion down to size, Tom Segev blames him for failures that were not his and gives him insufficient credit for his achievements. A closer examination of the historical record reveals a greater man than the one Segev attempts to dissect.

The War on History

Benny Morris

"People have often asked me if something like the revisionist Israeli historiography to which I contributed in the late 1980s exists on the Palestinian side."

How Many Tears?

Allan Arkush

Which played a larger role in Jewish migrations: oppression or economics?

Marx and the Jewish Fingerprint Question

Daniel B. Schwartz

Are there hints about Marx’s thoughts on Judaism in his writing, and if so, what do they say?

Faith in Princes

David G. Dalin

That FDR could have done more for the Jews in the Holocaust has long been known, but have we fully understood how much his inaction sprang from his own antisemitism?

The Lost Voices of Salonica

Alexander Nehamas

Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s prodigious research, a true labor of love, gives voice to the long-silenced Salonican Jews.

History with a Flourish

Jenna Weissman Joselit

So much gets lost in translation—and to history—when household items, heavy with use, first assume the status of heirlooms and then land in museum vitrines, heralded as art rather than history.

Super Stan

Michael Weingrad

Even in comparison with so many other contributions to American popular culture and entertainment, comic books are an especially Jewish story.

Golden Books

Allan Nadler

Three decades ago, Allan Nadler went to Vilna to reclaim books that the Nazis had plundered from YIVO, or so he thought. Dan Rabinowitz’s Lost Library solves the mystery—and raises important questions.

Thoreau and the Jewish Problem

Stuart Schoffman

When my friend and I read Walden, I shuttle between my old paperback, festooned with underlining and marginalia, and Jeffrey S. Cramer’s handsome annotated edition.

Lawrence of Judea: T. E. Lawrence and the Deal of the Twentieth Century

Rick Richman

"It is essential that [the Jewish community] should know that it is in Palestine as of right and not on sufferance." —Winston Churchill

Ba’al Teshuvah Poetics

Jake Marmer

Part of being a ba’al teshuvah is the yearning to stop being one—to finally blend with those who never had to return because they never left.

The Way We Live Now

Abraham Socher

One uncanny thing about this moment is that no one has yet put the experience we are all having—collectively yet separately, sometimes on Zoom—into articulate words.