Born to a Jewish family in Düsseldorf in 1797, Heinrich Heine attended university, became part of a scholarly circle that founded the academic discipline of Jewish studies, converted to Lutheranism (obtaining, in his own words, a “passport to European civilization”), and lived for most of his life in Paris, where he earned his reputation as one of the greatest poets in the German language. Reviewing a new biography of the poet by George Prochnik, along with a new translation of Heine’s Hebrew Melodies—a cycle of Jewish-themed poems—Neil Arditi notes that “no biography of Heine could possibly satisfy the demands of every Heine reader. Arditi writes:

Last month, Egypt celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula, which it had lost in the Six-Day War. Since then Cairo has not used the territory to launch attacks against the Jewish state, but it has once again become a bastion of terror—most of which has been associated with Islamic State and aimed at the Egyptian government. Jonny Essa and Ofir Winter examine the situation in the Sinai, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s recent speech on the subject, and the implications for Israel: