The Voynich manuscript is not written in any known language, and its 35 or so unique symbols have never been seen elsewhere. ...
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?” ...

Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home Nora Krug Scribner 2018, 288 pp., $30 All drawings by and photos

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Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States By Bradley W. Hart St. Martin’s/Thomas Dunne Books 2018,

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Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of

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In 2014, four people were shot to death at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, Belgium, two years after the killings of four Jews, including three children, at the Ozar Hatorah School in Toulouse in the south of France. These tragedies and others like them made it clear that anti-Semitism, that ...
For Israelis, bringing teenage sons and daughters barely out of high school to the army induction center to begin their compulsory military service is one of the most fraught and difficult realities of life. Underlying the cheerful, almost celebratory sendoff is the terrifying possibility of one day being forced to ...
In the year since the Harvey Weinstein case hit the headlines and the #MeToo movement exploded in every direction, I’ve felt increasingly distressed by the number of prominent Jewish men among the accused. Aside from the obvious names—from Senator Al Franken to conductor James Levine, from actors and journalists to ...
The news from Central Europe seems to be uniformly bad: democracy threatened, rule of law subverted, historical revisionism triumphant. It all carries a nasty 1930s flavor. To Western readers, moreover, most of that news seems to come from Budapest and Warsaw. We don’t hear much from such places as Bratislava, ...

Is the traditional family the foundation of democracy? It depends what kind of traditional family you’re talking about. Throughout most

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Is the traditional family the foundation of democracy? It’s the foundation of many things—happiness, social order, identity—and it’s essential to

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Ribbed moiré silk from Greece, tulle and silver-tinsel embroidery from Egypt, silk satin from Ottoman Palestine, indigo-dyed goat hair from

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