The late Midge Decter was a penetrating critic and a powerful writer. Her son joins the podcast this week to reflect on her legacy.

Did the Israeli government kidnap Yemenite Jewish children in the state’s early days? A historian joins us to explain the story, why it’s a myth, and why it won’t go away.

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.

A native of Odessa, the Jewish thinker needed no convincing that Ukrainians were a distinct nation. He understood that if they were subdued, no other nation would stand a chance.

Why, in the Hebrew Bible and the Odyssey alike, does the overweening human ambition to become somebody end in lowly banishment and dispersion?

“An earthquake in biblical scholarship” is how the discovery has been described. That’s true, as are the connections it reveals between ancient languages and modern ones.

Why was a random Polish shtetl singled out in the 19th century to become the home of fools in dozens of Jewish fables?

What do the Hebrew Bible and Homer have to say about clothes?

The Arabic word for meat is nearly the same as the Hebrew word for bread. The source of the difference reveals much about geography, culture, and human settlement.

The author of a new book arguing that Israel is the lodestar of Jewish life even for Jews in the Diaspora joins us to talk about his argument.

The Hebrew Bible and the Odyssey are both preoccupied by the moral and political consequences of ungoverned sexuality and aggression.