Summer 2024

Letters, Summer 2024

Marginally Nabokov Thank you for Allegra Goodman’s excellent review of Maya Arad’s newly translated collection of novellas, The Hebrew Teacher (“Od Tireh, Od Tireh . . .,” Spring 2024). I…

Swimming through History

Sarah Abrevaya Stein

The first time Alfred Nakache died, it was in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. The second time, it was in the water, where he was most at home.

An Unusable Past?

Leah Sarna

What did Jewish women know about Torah, and when did they know it?

Their Crowd

Allan Arkush

What influence did Jacob Schiff and other wealthy Jews wield over the invention of American Jewry?

Diminished Light?

Eli Rubin

Can a new book on tzimtzum expand our knowledge of that esoteric concept?

A Savannah Poet

Richard Kreitner

The Civil War cut short many lives, and in a book that blends the genres of history and memoir, Jason K. Friedman sets out the resurrect the memory of one of those lives.

Jews in Blue

Stuart Halpern

Did Civil War Jews hurl themselves into battle on Yom Kippur, host raucous Seders in camp, and decorate themselves with imaginary honors? Adam D. Mendelsohn walks through the strange history of the Civil War's Jewish soldiers.

Middlebrow’s Moment

Jesse Tisch

In the 1950s, Americans were introduced to Judaism. But what kind of Judaism, exactly?

A Tour Guide for the Perplexed

Allan Nadler

Is Noah Feldman's new book a modern Guide for the Perplexed or simply a perplexing tour?

Portrait of an Artist “Like Buttah”

Samantha Pickette

If anything ties Barbra Streisand's new memoir together, it's the author's intense need for control.

Romancing the Exile

Daniel B. Schwartz

Shaul Magid’s counter-Zionism is not so much a political program as it is a utopian posture.

Kamp Vught: David Koker’s Netherlands

Yeshua G. B. Tolle

In a concentration camp tucked quietly away in a forest near Amsterdam, David Koker kept a rare diary of life during Nazi internment.

An Inch Deep and a Mile Wide, or Vice Versa

Jeremy Dauber

Is Larry David good for the Jews?

As They Are

Agnieszka Traczewska, Shai Secunda

A unique view into the inner lives of Hasidic women.

Operation Hebrew Camp

Cole S. Aronson

No American Jewish camp nowadays can equal the ebullient Zionism or fidelity to Hebrew that propelled Arzt and Co. into the sky.