Book Review | She Came, She Sang, She Conquered
Barbra Streisand remains the single most powerful and enduring female Jewish cultural figure of my lifetime, writes Glenn Frankel.
‘Deeply Rooted’—Pursuing Reproductive Justice Through Art
“I’ve integrated prayer into these amulets and made them to resemble a pill box, evoking birth control,” says Charlie Schrön. The multimedia exhibition of work by 21 female artists is a powerful rejoinder to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade last spring.
Poetry | Reheat, by David Israel Katz
David Israel Katz writes us into spaces that negate sense, and importantly, negate our impulse to try to locate sense.
From 2006 | Marked For Life
A tattoo offers a means of protesting against one part of society while conforming to another. A young Israeli put it perfectly when he said, “I want a different tattoo, like everybody else.”
Comic | Learning to Dance with AI
For the past seven years, I’ve been writing and drawing a book about Artificial Intelligence, specifically about a large language model built from a family archive.
Literary Moment | Traveling the Land, Book in Hand
It is very difficult to come up with a catalog of books for a literary tour of Israel. No matter how long the list, there will always be disagreements and arguments about the canon, what is included and what is left out.
On Poetry | Nelly Sachs and the Poetry of Flight
Sachs dropped the masks that had let her speak through the murdered Jews of Europe and wrote from her own position in the world.
The Stars of David that Aren’t
Violins decorated with mother-of-pearl six-pointed stars have gained popularity and value with claims of Jewish or Holocaust origins. What do the experts say?
Visual Moment | Sacred Art from an Italian Ghetto
In the middle of the 18th century in the city of Ancona on the Adriatic coast of central Italy, a young Jewish girl, about age 15, produced a stunning work of embroidery.
Italian Jews: Rome, the Renaissance and Beyond
A new museum in the medieval city of Ferrara illuminates more than two millennia of history. But it has yet to directly grapple with the Holocaust.
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.
Book Review | In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea by Michael Brenner
Brenner’s In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea chronicles the competing ambitions to preserve and nourish Jews and Judaism in safety, embraced by an array of Jewish thinkers and leaders from the late 19th century into the present. Would it be by assimilating into the dominant culture, as the Jewish German foreign minister Walther Rathenau argued?