Book Review | The Life of a Library
In Prince of the Press, Joshua Teplitsky brings us inside David Oppenheim's library to explore the ways this collection both reflected and shaped the intellectual heritage of Central European Jewry....
Arts & Culture
Book Review | Hollywood’s Proud Zionist
The great French film director Jean-Luc Godard called Ben Hecht a “genius” who “invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood today.” Yet most modern American Jews have likely never heard of Hecht, despite his eminence as a playwright, best-selling novelist and screenwriter of...
Book Review | The American Jewish Identity Crisis Rages On
American Jews may not know their way around the Talmud or much about Jewish history, but they sure do excel at soul-searching and have for many, many years. In the late 19th century, in the mid-20th and again in our own day, taking the community’s...
Author Interview | Biographer Zachary Leader on Saul Bellow
With publication of the second and final volume of his monumental biography of Saul Bellow, Zachary Leader, a professor of English literature at the University of Roehampton in London, has completed a decade-long immersion in Bellow’s life and letters. ...
Amos Oz, Beloved Israeli Author, Dies at 79
Famed Israeli author Amos Oz has passed away today, aged 79, after a short battle with cancer. Perhaps the most renowned Israeli author, Oz's work has been translated into 45 languages and won dozens of awards, including the prestigious Goethe Prize and the Israel Prize...
Book Review | The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, 3 vols. by Robert Alter
The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, 3 vols. by Robert Alter W. W. Norton 2018, 3500 pp, $125 [divider] When I first learned that Robert Alter had completed the task of singlehandedly translating the entire Bible, a project he commenced around 1995, my mind went to Lawrence of Arabia....
Author Interview | Judea Pearl
Does the rooster’s crow cause the sunrise? The answer seems obvious, if you’re a human—but a machine can only understand that the rooster’s crow and the sunrise are related, not which causes the other. This problem is at the heart of The Book of Why,...
Book Review | Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land by Amos Oz
Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land by Amos Oz Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2018, 138 pp, $15.31 [divider] Amos Oz’s modest new book of nonfiction is a container for some somber thoughts and for scraps left over from earlier lectures and books—refined and re-sorted, though ultimately not completely resolved. The...
Six More Jewish Movies to Stream on Netflix
An updated list of Jewish movies streaming on Netflix—including everything from Jewish comedies to dramas to documentaries....
Bob Dylan’s ‘Blood on the Tracks’ Comes to the Big Screen
Director Luca Guadagnino announced that he is planning to adapt Bob Dylan’s 1975 album Blood on the Tracks for the screen. ...