Arts & Culture

Hebrew is full of goats these days, and English and French aren’t too far behind. Where’d they all come from?

Feb. 29 2024 12:01AM

In many ways, Abraham Cahan was a stereotypically rationalist Lithuanian Jew, able to rein in his emotions and do what he felt right.

Feb. 26 2024 3:37AM

Many Dostoevsky scholars have been Jews, perhaps because the anti-Semitic writer needed to be seen as theirs—as almost Jewish in his concerns.

Dec. 26 2023 12:01AM

Why Russian Jews believed that reading Dostoevsky would legitimize their place in Russian culture and protect them from accusations of being interlopers.

Dec. 22 2023 12:01AM

Featuring fears, fates, burdens of power, memory wars, Sabbath days, Russian writers and timeless questions, years of upheaval, Japanese Jews, and more.

Dec. 21 2023 12:01AM

Featuring prime ministers, kidnappings, popes, silences, exiled shadows, portraits, intellectual origins, the best minds, and more.

Dec. 20 2023 12:01AM

That’s why geniuses like Dostoevsky can love all humanity and hate the Jews.

Dec. 18 2023 12:01AM

The long-running case of the word for private detective can finally be considered closed.

Dec. 12 2023 12:01AM

The case of the literary master helps explain why people who devote themselves to compassion for all so often make an exception for Jews.

Dec. 4 2023 3:59AM

In the wake of the Yom Kippur War, the words yom kippur shel, “the Yom Kippur of,” have referred in Israeli speech to any debacle that might have been prevented by better judgment.

Sept. 20 2023 12:01AM

The only Jewish personality who ranks with the Yiddish writer Y.L. Peretz was Herzl, who devoted himself to a similar task in the political domain.

Aug. 30 2023 12:01AM

The great Yiddish writer envisioned an unbroken transmission of Jewishness through the generations, from biblical prophets to talmudic sages to literary giants like Heine—and himself.

Aug. 7 2023 12:01AM

The author of a new book on the subject joins Mosaic’s editor to talk about the technology and artistry of Hebrew writing, and the vocation of the Hebrew scribe.

Tikvah Podcast at Mosaic and Izzy Pludwinski
July 28 2023 12:01AM

One of the show’s main pleasures has to do with which of the four languages spoken by its main characters—Yiddish, Flemish, French, and English—they use with whom.

May 10 2023 12:08AM