Beshert | This Isn’t What I Ordered
“I dreamed of certain outcomes. But it’s the ones I didn’t see coming that feel exactly right—beshert.”
Coronavirus Quarantine Reading List
More than a month ago, I was in southern California with the preparedness prophet Max Brooks discussing the coronavirus. “We can’t blow this off!” he...
Book Review | When the Ivory Tower Closed Its Gates
Imagine a U.S. law that kept thousands of European Jews and others from obtaining visas to the United States in the 1930s, leaving many of them to deportation and death.
Book Review | The Israeli-Palestinian Infinite Polygon
Apeirogon, the new novel by acclaimed author Colum McCann, could take place anywhere, yet is also essentially
Primo Levi’s Work Outshines His Murky Death
In the years since his death, scholars, biographers and those who knew him remain split.
Book Review | A Writer Who Opened Doors
How tragic that we recently lost one of Israel’s great writers—Ronit Matalon—who died at the young age of 58.
My People in Cartoons
A combination of misanthropy and compassion for your fellow humans, and at least some ability to draw and write—this is what makes a cartoonist.
Book Review | The Passions of a Prime Minister, Revealed
What quality did people see in David Ben-Gurion that made him indispensable, when so many other qualities made him plainly impossible?
In ‘Call Me by Your Name’ Sequel, a Chance at Second Love
If Call Me by Your Name, the bestselling 2007 romance novel by André Aciman, was an ode to the passions and discoveries of a first love, then Aciman’s new sequel, Find Me, asks us to believe in something much more perilous: second love.
The Magic of Alice Hoffman
The best-selling writer infuses her new novel on the Holocaust with Jewish legend—in the form of a rare female golem. “For me,” she says, “literature and magic are kind of melded together.”
Five Books to Be an Educated Jew: Part II
Jewish thinkers and doers—including Noah Feldman, Angela Buchdahl, Fania Oz-Salzberger and Joan Nathan—share five recommendations.
Book Review | Steely Veneer, Private Struggle
I met Susan Sontag only once; it was after a dramatic reading of a translation of Witold Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk, which I went to hear with a group of friends in 1994.