To an outsider, it would seem self-evident that Ḥaredim are conservatives, given their passionate attachment to religion and to the family, and to preserving their way of life. Yet, notes Yehoshua Pfeffer, there is something deeply radical about the ḥaredi community’s demand for religious intensity and personal sacrifice by all of its members. As ultra-Orthodoxy, especially in Israel, is beginning to undergo major changes in the face of a variety of economic and demographic pressures, Pfeffer argues that Western conservative thought can provide Ḥaredim with necessary guidance and perspective. Basing himself on his 2017 essay “Toward a Conservative Chareidism” as a point of departure, he discusses these ideas with Mark Gottlieb. (Audio, 35 minutes.)

Reviewing Stranger Than Fiction, a new history of the 20th-century novel, Joseph Epstein draws attention to what’s missing:

A novelist and short-story writer who gets no mention whatsoever in Stranger Than Fiction is Isaac Bashevis Singer. When from time to time I am asked who among the writers of the past half century is likely to be read 50 years from now, Singer’s is the first name that comes to mind. His novels and stories can be sexy, but sex, unlike in many of the novels of Norman Mailer, William Styron, or Philip Roth, is never chiefly about sex. His stories are about that much larger subject, the argument of human beings with God. What Willa Cather and Isaac Bashevis Singer have that too few of the other novelists discussed in Stranger Than Fiction possess are central, important, great subjects.