People of the Book World
"The Jewish market has become quite a good one,” a Knopf editor observed; even the “goy polloi” were buying, wrote another staffer.
Radically Enlightened Jews
Jonathan Israel is a minyan of modern revolutionaries.
The Blessings of Manasia
His father recited Modeh Ani every morning and ordered a set of tefillin from Mumbai. Unaware that they were meant to be worn and not merely kept, he put them away on a shelf.
The Most Important Word in the World
For a moment, a literary giant and talmudic genius sparred over the implications of a biblical phrase.
The Protocols of Neoliberalism
Baram’s characters are righteously indignant at the system and determined to bring it down.
The Wry Comedy of A. B. Yehoshua
Remembering the ebullient spirit and radical fiction of A. B. Yehoshua.
Think Over My Lesson and Try to Destroy It
When Levinas met a vagabond called Chouchani, he told a friend, “I cannot tell what he knows, all I can say is that all that I know, he knows.” Now that we have dozens of Chouchani’s notebooks, can we finally know what he knew?
Walking with Walter Benjamin
On losing one’s self in Walter Benjamin’s final wanderings.
“The One You Love”? A Case of Divine Disappointment
Which son did Abraham favor? Reading "the binding of Isaac" with fresh eyes.
EUGENE NADELMAN: A Tale of the 1980s in Verse
"Our tale's debut / Takes place in 1982 / When I, for one, if not exactly / A double of our leading guy / Was like him, bookish, awkward, shy." - Coming of age in iambic tetrameter.