Book Review | Before Heschel Became Heschel
Abraham Joshua Heschel once towered as America’s foremost Jewish public intellectual. In this hour, he might well be the thinker of the hour.
Book Review | Why the Left Left Israel
Vivian Gornick reviews Susie Linfield’s The Lions’ Den, a book critiquing the Left’s stance on Israel through a variety of notable thinkers, including Hannah Arendt, Noam Chomsky, and others.
Book Review | JDate for the Dead
Author Geraldine Brooks reviews Nathan Englander’s new book, kaddish.com
Book Review | Harvey Milk by Lillian Faderman
Last April, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to name the main terminal at San Francisco International Airport after Harvey Milk, the gay rights martyr who was assassinated 40 years ago. The decision further (and literally) cements Milk’s legacy as the best-known LGBT activist in American history.
Book Review | Gateway To The Moon by Mary Morris
Entrada de la Luna, New Mexico, is a small town with a big mystery. Why do its Spanish Catholic families light candles on Friday night? Why doesn’t anyone eat pork? The answers, it turns out, lie half a millennium ago, in 15th-century Spain.
Book Review | Mapping the Bones by Jane Yolen
Although a work of fiction, Mapping the Bones has enough of a historical basis to make it read like a convincing survivor’s account, one that does the essential work of bearing witness to a tattered and bloody past.
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?
Book Review | A History of Judaism by Martin Goodman
A History of Judaism
Martin Goodman
Princeton University Press
2018, 656 pp, $28.08
Surveys of religious literacy show that, as a group, American Jews do not know very much...
Book Review // When Basketball Was Jewish: Voices of Those Who Played the Game
In Farewell to Sport, published in 1938, the popular New York Daily News sports columnist Paul Gallico, when departing the world of sports to write fiction (The Poseidon Adventure later became one of his best-sellers), reflected on the wide variety of sports and sports figures he had covered.
Book Review | Jewish Comedy: A Serious history
Funny Jews: An Epistolary Conversation
Book Review // Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism and Delegitimizing Israel
At the end of the 19th century, European liberals and Zionists developed diametrically opposite strategies for dealing with the menace posed by anti-Semitism…
Book Review // Moonglow
Michael Chabon’s first published works, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and A Model World, were realist, lovely and a little dull with caution. Chabon himself describes his early work as “plotless and sparkling with epiphanic dew,”