From the Editor | Lessons of Leadership From My Mother
My mother, Ruth Epstein, was a dynamic leader. She stayed home like many suburban moms of her era but was also the president of a number of women’s organizations and a leader of local causes.
Staff Picks: Medieval Jews in England, National Lampoon and Poland’s B-Day
What we’re reading—and watching—this week
Staff Picks: Weimar Berlin, Jewish Jazz and Ben Gurion’s Rice
What we’re reading—and watching—this week.
Julius Rosenwald: Building Schools in the Jim Crow South
When Rosenwald decided to give away hundreds of thousands of dollars to mark his fiftieth birthday, Booker T. Washington encouraged him to donate a portion of the money to build schools for African American children in the segregated south.
Staff Picks: Lebanon’s First Oscar Nod, Mobula Rays and Gaby Hoffman
What we’re reading—and watching—this week.
American Jewish Literature: Dead or Alive?
With
Gal Beckerman / Nicholas Delbanco / Nathan Englander / Rebecca Goldstein / Allegra Goodman / Mohsin Hamid / Dara Horn / Aaron Lansky / Ruby Namdar / Alicia Ostriker...
The Lioness Roars Again: Golda Meir at 120
Although she was a trailblazer, second-wave feminists in the 1960s disliked her, and she returned their ire, describing them as “crazy women who burn their bras and…hate men.” Meir resented attempts to turn her into a feminist icon.
Jewish Word | When a Knish Is More Than a Knish
During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump proclaimed at a rally that Hillary Clinton “got schlonged” in the 2008 primaries. Schlong, when used as a noun, is a Yiddish word for penis—and a pretty vulgar one at that. But when used as a verb, is it even a word?
An Artist’s Secret, Now Fully Revealed
When Charlotte (called Lotte by her family) was eight years old, her mother died. At the time she was told the cause was influenza—the truth was kept a carefully guarded secret.
Book Review | In Days to Come: A New Hope for Israel by Avraham Burg
Zionism has always been a fiercely ideological movement. Socialist Labor Zionism gave rise to Israel’s Labor Party and to many of Israel’s best-known leaders, such as David Ben-Gurion, Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin.
Book Review | Eternal Life by Dara Horn
Dara Horn’s new novel, Eternal Life, imagines two characters who have made a sacred pact that consigns them to lives that will never end. Tethered to wearying and repetitive perpetuity, they cannot encounter the crossover from purpose to purposelessness that my mother-in-law experienced.
Book Review | What Is It All But Luminous: Notes from an Underground Man by Art Garfunkel
“I have these vocal cords. Two,” the singer Art Garfunkel writes near the start of his intriguing book of impressionistic musings about his life, “They have vibrated with the love of sound since I was five and began to sing with the sense of God’s gift running through me.”