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...
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
Amos Oz’s modest new book of nonfiction is a container for some...
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.
Staff Picks: Seafood Menus, Lisbon Kabbalists and ‘Miracle Child’
I’ve been doing some tourism in South Carolina and…reading menus.
A German-American Artist Searches for a Cultural Identity
“How do you know who you are, if you don’t understand where you come from?” Nora Krug asks toward the beginning of her stunning visual memoir, Belonging: A German Reckons With History And Home.
Talk of the Table | Why Feminists Should Eat Dairy on Hanukkah
Hanukkah is associated with the bravery of the Maccabees, the group of heroic Jews who rebelled against the Greek-Syrian empire, defeated it against all odds...
On Being a Jewish American Writer in 2018
On November 12, Erika Dreifus presented the Creative Keynote Address at the 24th Annual Jewish American and Holocaust Literature Symposium in Miami.
Is This Mysterious Language Hebrew?
The Voynich manuscript is not written in any known language, and its 35 or so unique symbols have never been seen elsewhere.
Jewish Word | Shamash
n the 1946 film The Big Sleep, based on the Raymond Chandler mystery of the same name, Carmen—the promiscuous, drug-addicted younger sister of Lauren Bacall’s character—sizes up Philip Marlowe, played by Humphrey Bogart, and asks him, “What are you, a prizefighter?” Bogart responds, “No, I’m a shamus.” “What’s a shamus?” she inquires. “It’s a private detective,” he answers. Yes, Bogart is using the Yiddish version—more popularly spelled “shammes”—of the Hebrew word, “shamash.”
Carl Lutz: Gently Shaking the World
While Jews honor heroes like Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg, the name of Carl Lutz is virtually unknown.
Book Review | Beirut Rules
Reading Beirut Rules takes us back to the unhappy 1980s when American diplomats, spies, and the military would be assigned to the Middle East—a complex and dangerous region that very few of them understood—and became sitting ducks for increasingly sophisticated terrorists who were financed and directed by Iran.