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.

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.

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.

The characters in her new story collection are fully formed creatures of that transitional 20th-century moment between European Jewish survivors and American forgetters.

The founding editor of the Jewish Review Books joins us to discuss his educational formation, his intellectual preoccupations, and the essays that make up his new book.

The great Jewish writer evoked a city—now under threat from Russia’s armies—with a character of its own that has entered into folklore, literature, and the popular imagination.

One recent Saturday morning, I was following the Torah portion from a late-13th-century manuscript and noticed some strange faded text and stress lines. What did they mean?

The name is comical and magical at once, designating a city of broad boulevards and fancy shop windows known to Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the dairyman and others.

Last month saw the first-ever production of Herzl’s little-known play The New Ghetto in the country he brought into being. The performance was touched with the sublime.

A new hasidic art gallery grows in Brooklyn and is already bucking stereotypes. Can it survive, and what does it suggest about contemporary Orthodox life?

Despite extensive similarities, few readers have studied Genesis together with the Odyssey in hopes of illuminating the human condition. What lies waiting to be discovered?

Of all the expletives, the f-word alone continues to be partially censored. Perhaps that’s because it still connotes menace in a way that other expletives do not.

At a public bath in east London, three of the city’s most insular groups—cockneys, Russian immigrants, and ḥasidic Jews—sweat together in peace. How?

Four more of our writers pick several favorites each, featuring two Ruths, passengers, Lincoln, Verdun, chief rabbis, Jewish Montreal, sweet spots, a fortress, and more.