Adam Kirsch

Much can be gleaned about Walter Benjamin’s Jewishness, and that of his whole class, from this short diary. He is evidently completely unobservant—mor

Not every edition of the haggadah is quite as effective at making the past present as The Washington Haggadah. This beautifully produced book is a det

The literary career of Imre Kertész has been as full of improbable twists as any melodrama. It took him a decade to complete his first novel, an accou

In 2005, George Bornstein published a scholarly article titled “The Colors of Zion: Black, Jewish, and Irish Nationalisms at the Turn of the Century.”

For Michael Weingrad, it is precisely the marginality, even the perversity, of the American Hebraist project that makes it so immensely interesting. “

Foreign Bodies By Cynthia Ozick (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 255 pp., $26) I. ‘There is no swarming like that of Israel when once Israel has got a start, and the scene here bristled, at every step, with the signs and sounds, immitigable, unmistakable, of a Jewry that had burst all bounds. ...

The Rise and Fall of the Bible is Timothy Beal’s attempt to shatter the popular understanding of the Bible as a combination of divine instruction manu

In the brief national soul-searching that followed the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, many observers, including President Obama, reflected on the troubling excess of anger and moral indignation in our political discourse—the kind of indignation that turns opponents into enemies, and campaigns into crusades. Yet, even as responsible figures on the right and the left in America are urging their fellow-citizens (in Roger Ailes’s surprising words) to “tone it down,” the best-selling book in France is a pamphlet titled Indignez-vous!—roughly, Get Angry!

Sari Nusseibeh is not a Palestinian Gandhi—he is a secular intellectual, not a saint, and while he has occupied prominent roles in Palestinian life (f

Zeruya Shalev writes about character and emotion in a thoroughly psychoanalytic spirit. Indeed, one of the surprising features of this Israeli novel i

The New Republic

Youth Was Not Silent

The Memory Table

The Boulders

When the Pot Melted

The Temple Mount in New York

Beyond Idolatry

The Baffling Book

The Trouble With Anger

The Thought Experiment

Ashen

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