At the time of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, overwhelming numbers of Jews—not only in the Land of Israel, but also in the thriving Diaspora communities of what are now Turkey, Syria, and Egypt—lived in a thoroughly Hellenistic milieu, where Greek was the primary language and culture. Simon Goldhill argues that the sages of the Talmud were acutely aware of this culture, and deliberately shaped their works and ideas in contradistinction to its beliefs, attitudes, and even literary modes. Nowhere, he explains in conversation with J.J. Kimche, was this more evident than in the genre of narrative known as aggada, or, more colloquially, as midrash. (Audio, 63 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.