In 1939, the same year Scarlett O’Hara mourned her lost Tara on the silver screen, a prominent Conservative rabbi named Milton Steinberg published a near-500-page work of historical fiction—never, for reasons that surely have to do with anti-Semitism, made into a movie—set in the era of the Talmudic sages.
The novel, As a Driven Leaf, tells ...

Whither the shlemiel? According to a smart and much-discussed New York Magazine article last May, American Jewish prosperity has all but killed off the “neurotic, depressive, abrasive, excluded” antiheroes that once animated a comedic tradition running from Groucho Marx to Woody Allen. Larry David, entertainment critic Mark Harris argued in his essay, is keeping their ...

• Israel’s interior minister says he is “very sorry for the embarrassment” resulting from his government’s approval yesterday of 1,600 new E. J’lem homes as Joe Biden arrived in the country to support peace talks—but the approval is still in effect. Biden’s now trying to reassure the P.A. that all is not lost. [AP]
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Great medieval Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi is golden this month, and not just because he lived during the Golden Age of Spain. First, Nextbook Press—Tablet Magazine’s close relation—published an acclaimed biography of Halevi by Hillel Halkin, who argues that his subject was, in addition to the poet laureate of the Jewish people, in many ways ...

As part of a major restructuring effort, the Jewish Theological Seminary announced last week that its cantorial school, traditionally separate from the rabbinical school, will be integrated into the rabbinical school. Henry Rosenblum, the well-regarded dean of the H.L. Miller Cantorial School, will be laid off. The move provoked an outcry from the seminary’s cantorial ...

A young man taking a long, languorous bath is paid a visit by his mother, who sits down (presumably on the toilet seat) to chat, and, despite her son’s half-hearted attempts to get rid of her, remains there for most of the next 48 pages. She’s come to talk about the young man’s college-aged sister, ...

Purim is just around the corner (it begins February 28th), and that means just one thing: yummy yummy hamentaschen. Well, two things: yummy yummy hamentaschen and a long essay in Commentary decrying feminist reinterpretations of the holiday.
The article—by Abby Wisse Schachter, an editor at the New York Post—employs the common Commentary tactic of labeling a ...

Bernard-Henri Lévy, self-styled bearer of the torch of Enlightenment and engagée intellectualism, was making the rounds in New York City this week. Last night, he got center stage at a panel discussion at Columbia cosponsored by the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA), which is essentially the French Anti-Defamation League. Topic: “Freedom of Expression: ...

Last we reported, the feud between Brooklyn’s Satmar Hasidim and the borough’s bicycle enthusiasts had rounded the bend into full-scale performance art: cycling activists, protesting the Department of Transportation’s removal of a bike lane that ran through the Satmar ’hood, scheduled a nude ride along the route where the lane had been, on Shabbos no ...

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s new 36 Arguments for the Existence of God notes prominently on its cover that it is “a work of fiction.” But you can’t always judge a book by its cover. 36 Arguments is indeed a novel, if a pretty heady one: it tells the story of Professor Cass Seltzer, whose studies in ...