Book Review | We Were Slaves In Egypt—and Slaveowners
Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History
By Craig Perry
Princeton University Press, 368 pp.
Each year at Passover, Jews gather around the seder table and...
Book Review | My Destroyer, My Meteorite
My Lover, the Rabbi
By Wayne Koestenbaum
Farrar Straus and Giroux, 464 pp.
It could be wisdom, it could be wads of cash, it could be the transgression...
Book Review | His Own Story
Place Envy: Essays in Search of Orientation
By Michael Lowenthal
Mad Creek Books, 296 pp
I, too, have been a victim of the phrase “Wherever you go, there...
Book Review | Kids’ Tales Told In a Distinctively Yiddish Key
Central to Yiddish’s complex history is regret for a future that could have been if only had there not been a Holocaust.
Book Review | When The Gods Belonged To Everyone
When bishops and rabbis excoriated necromancers it was more a question of keeping that magical talent in clerical hands than one of efficacy.
The Strategist Who Called It: How India-Gulf-Israel Integration Survived Gaza
In his new book, Mohammed Soliman lays out a grand strategy that integrates Israel into a wider region he calls “West Asia” and argues that Israel’s place in the emerging regional order depends on Palestinian statehood.
Book Review | Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgment
Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgment
By G. Edward White
Oxford University Press, 408 pp.
Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson felt unfulfilled in the early 1940s...
Book Review | A Polish Jewish Experiment in Modernity
Reading Joanna Olczak-Ronikier’s book about her family, I was reminded of my first morning in Poland on a reporting assignment in 1981.
Book Review | Testament to an Alchemy of Hope and Despair
Labeling it a glorified scrapbook wouldn’t fit the bill, though its fusion of words and images, its blurring of the self and the collective, brings one to mind.
Book Review | The Street Where They Live
Lev’s wise and witty stories trace the lives and struggles of Baka’s denizens over the three decades following the 1967 Six-Day War.
Book Review | Civil War-Era Jews, as Divided as the Nation
For U.S. Jews today, their forebears’ division and equivocation in the face of slavery’s evils can only be a cause for sober reflection.
Book Review | Three Windows on a War in Progress
There is no pleasure in accompanying Sharabi through his ordeal and his personal losses, but we can get some pleasure from the vivid description of his liberation day.