Arts & Culture
The figure of the great fairy king in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is descended from Judah Maccabee.
Six more Mosaic writers share their favorites, featuring shadow strikes, orchards, gleanings, constitutional evolutions and revolutions, serotonin, odd women, and more.
Seven of our regular writers pick several favorites each, featuring sieges, spies, cultural revolutions, family papers, useful enemies, new fields of inquiry, and more.
Let us sing of rodomont, Sinon, proditomania, and, in particular, grobian.
Mieczysław Weinberg wrote music equal in its genius to Mahler and Shostakovich, including one of the most powerful tributes to the victims of 20th-century tyranny.
Lauded in Israel but unknown outside, Zelda’s poetry provides an alternative to the desacralized cosmos in which most of us live.
In a season of mass protests in Hong Kong and a fierce dustup with the NBA, the acclaimed new Chinese-American film is (almost) silent on the costs of engaging with authoritarianism.
In 1960s Israel, Arabic-speaking Jews were invaluable as spies for their new country. In normal life, they were marginalized.
His reputation will fall and rise with his people’s.
The great theme of his work is resistance to spiritual constraint, the soul’s freedom as the highest value.
Why, in all of Jewish art, is there no image depicting the moment of Moses’ death?
Bellow’s whole career as a writer was devoted to this dichotomy, sometimes veering toward one pole, sometimes toward the other, but never losing sight of both.
The Jewish writer who became America’s most decorated novelist spent his early years prodding the nation’s soul. Then, sensing danger to it, he took up the role of guardian.
In The Smoke, the latest from the British writer Simon Ings, “Bundists” turn into grotesque shape-shifters. The implications are at once unclear and unsettling.
