Letters
Letters, Spring 2025
Delayed Ratification; Pain Points
Reviews
Escape Goat
Dara Horn's new graphic novel about a neverending Passover seder and a talking, time-travelling goat is great fun. It's also a deep meditation on Jewish history and memory.
Bewitched and Between
In the talmudic era, many Jewish legal documents were standardized. Even magic bowls inscribed with methods to divorce a demon.
A Terrible Price
An anthropologist-soldier's field notes from Gaza are less a tour of the battlefield than of the author’s troubled mind.
American Pharaohs
A new book doesn’t aim to skewer Jewish defenders of slavery or celebrate Jewish abolitionists, but to understand them, warts and all.
In Dissent
What gives people the courage to stand against oppressive governments? Why do regular citizens dissent?
Delmore’s Gift
If Delmore Schwartz's recognition had been doled out in more moderate increments, perhaps it wouldn't have so completely undone him.
Manea’s Shadows
Norman Manea's Judaism turned out to be the hinge to his career, if not the whole door.
Strange Air Above the Ladder
In Yehoshua November's latest collection, the mundanity of cleaning out a fridge sits comfortably alongside glimpses of the divine.
Chariot and Saucer
David Halperin spent an academic lifetime studying mystical visionaries from Ezekiel to the Sabbatians. But first came the UFO truthers.
Readings
Resurrection: The Triumph of Life in Judaism
I grew up blessing the God who "resurrects the dead" but I never heard it discussed.
The Future Is Old
Rabbi Tarfon let his mother literally step on him. It wasn't enough, his colleagues said.
First Person
My Father’s Resistance: A Memoir
A history of Holocaust survival, found near a basement boiler.
Lost & Found
The Shopkeeper on East Broadway
Yenta Serdatsky, Dalia Wolfson
"Are things going well? Who knows? A happy person doesn’t go gray at the age of forty or stare out at the world with such sad eyes." A glimpse at the Jewish street from 1925.
The Arts
Form Without Function
The Brutalist's foundation as a film is fundamentally shaky.
Last Word
Kidnapped Choruses?
Songs akin to “Chad Gadya” or “Echad Mi Yodea” have been found from France to the Caucasus Mountains. Who came first?
