Book Review // Little Failure: A memoir by Gary Shteyngart
The title, Little Failure, is of course ironic. By now, after Gary Shteyngart’s three best-selling comic novels, many travel articles and dozens of interviews—in which he rarely gives a straight answer—his Russian Jewish immigrant parents must have forgiven him for not becoming the lawyer or accountant they envisioned. Or have they?
The Secret History of X & O
An investigation into the religious roots of the symbols for hugs & kisses.
James Kugel: Professor of Disbelief
When I was a teenager, there was a legend repeated in the Jewish schools of my hometown. If you somehow manage to get into godless Harvard, don’t go. But if, against your rosh yeshiva and rebbe’s advice, you actually go, whatever you do, don’t take biblical scholar James Kugel’s class. If you do, you’ll walk into Introduction to the Bible, see that the professor is wearing a yarmulke and assume the course is kosher. And, the story goes, you’ll walk out a heretic.
Ask the Rabbis // Contraception
Opinion | Do We Still Need an Arbiter of Anti-Semitism?
Book Review // Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler, and the Warsaw Uprising
By Konstanty Gebert. Over the past few years, a series of books has brought to the attention of English-speaking readers the morally challenging, historically important and often overlooked or forgotten story of the Polish contribution to the Allied war effort in World War II, and of the terrible fate of the Poles under German rule.
Opinion // Jews Aren’t the Only Ones Marrying Out
By Mark Oppenheimer // Fewer and fewer American religious groups practice endogamy today.
Opinion // Rip-Off Rabbis and Sacred Scammers
By Naomi Ragen // Several high-profile Israeli rabbis have come under fire for less-than-holy schemes.
Opinion // The Politics and Ethics of Street Tzedakah
Ask the Rabbis // Religion & Science
In what ways, if any, do science and Judaism conflict?
Opinion: The American Jewish Thought Police on Patrol
A political “big tent” would be better for Washington, DC’s Theater J and everyone else. // By Marshall Breger