Literature
Why Scripture belongs in English class.
A new collection of the American Jewish writer’s work shows a core of brilliance surrounded by dreck.
“Art eludes the mind of an activist.”
Flannery O’Connor at the movies.
Friendship and the American story.
In her latest short fiction, the great American Jewish writer retells the true story of Edgardo Mortara, a young Italian boy taken by the pope in 1858 and raised to become a priest.
Many Dostoevsky scholars have been Jews, perhaps because the anti-Semitic writer needed to be seen as theirs—as almost Jewish in his concerns.
“I ask myself whether I might one day be able to emigrate to Israel.”
Featuring fears, fates, burdens of power, memory wars, Sabbath days, Russian writers and timeless questions, years of upheaval, Japanese Jews, and more.
Featuring prime ministers, kidnappings, popes, silences, exiled shadows, portraits, intellectual origins, the best minds, and more.
The long-running case of the word for private detective can finally be considered closed.
The case of the literary master helps explain why people who devote themselves to compassion for all so often make an exception for Jews.
The great Yiddish writer envisioned an unbroken transmission of Jewishness through the generations, from biblical prophets to talmudic sages to literary giants like Heine—and himself.
The late American novelist was no nihilist.