Arts & Culture

Watch our recording of the modern Israeli classic. Then stick around for the discussion with Israeli novelist Ruby Namdar and American rabbi Daniel Bouskila.

The Editors, Jonathan Silver, Haim Sabato, Ruby Namdar and Daniel Bouskila
Dec. 28 2022 12:01AM

Featuring wars, peacemakers, two cultures, pogroms, plays, four ages, wild problems, caves, magic, letters, American conservatives, liberal parents, radical children, and more.

Dec. 19 2022 12:01AM

The novelist and rabbi Haim Sabato infuses tradition into fiction as well as any of the Yiddish greats. The difference? His work is unencumbered by modern angst.

Dec. 5 2022 12:01AM

I’ve been spared an encounter with the neologism until lately. But, frankly, now that I have made its acquaintance, I find it idiotic. (And don’t get me started about “goysplaining.”)

Oct. 24 2022 12:01AM

The spy show seems so accurate I found myself wondering whether its creators are themselves former Mossad agents who spent time in the titular city.

Oct. 19 2022 12:01AM

Looking back to the venerable genre, I’m struck by how often anti-Semitism presents itself. The late John Le Carré is only the most recent to be accused of that unpleasant condition.

Oct. 12 2022 12:24AM

Michelangelo had a thousand years of Catholic art to build on when creating the Sistine Chapel. Jews haven’t had such a tradition, until a secular Jew from Brooklyn stepped up.

Aug. 31 2022 12:01AM

A musical expert joins us to chat about one of the most important and unique figures in the world of Jewish music, and share some of his most captivating songs.

Aug. 12 2022 12:01AM

Some have claimed that the hybrid dialect is on its way to becoming a new Yiddish, as different from 21st-century English as Yiddish is from medieval German. Are they right?

Aug. 10 2022 12:01AM

In the end, one doesn’t know what to be struck by more: the fact that a computer can translate Hebrew at all, or the fact that when it does, it does so atrociously.

July 6 2022 12:01AM

The middle of the 20th century inaugurated a time when American Jewish sons stopped being able to imagine themselves as Jewish fathers—and we’re still living in it.

June 16 2022 12:01AM

The language of Homer delights in illuminating the world at length. The language of the Bible, by contrast, is compact, but fraught with the agitated flow of emotions.

June 2 2022 12:01AM

One of America’s greatest living playwrights is also one of the more Jewishly compelling writers of our time, even if he gets left out of the bar-mitzvah anthologies.

May 18 2022 12:01AM

The signal achievement of Genesis is to find heroism not just on the field of battle—where Odysseus, too, excels—but on the hardscrabble ground of everyday life.

May 4 2022 12:01AM