‘Beginning of the Sabbath,’ published by Anton Hohenstein c. 1868
CREDIT: Library of Congress

Shabbat, that microcosm of God’s seventh-day rest, is the subject of Judith Shulevitz’s graceful, erudite new book, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time (the subject of this week’s Vox Tablet podcast). But the weekly renewal of candlelighting, winedrinking, and ...

The 54-year-old South African artist William Kentridge was born into a family of lawyers: a grandfather who was elected to Parliament, a grandmother who was the first female barrister in the country’s history, and liberal Jewish parents who were powerful anti-apartheid figures in Johannesburg’s legal community. And so when Kentridge—who had dabbled in performance, theater, ...

But the truth was that, while the marital mattress sagged between its creaking slats to the earthen floor and was only a few feet from the clay stove on which the twins slept, there were opportunities enough. And though Basha Puah would hiss at Salo for disturbing her much needed sleep and complain of a ...

As she made clear in this week’s Vox Tablet podcast, Judith Shulevitz has, with her new book The Sabbath World, offered us nothing less than a kaleidoscopic picture of the day of rest. Below, with excerpts from eight of today’s leading Jewish fiction writers (and a posthumous entry from I.B. Singer), we offer a ...

The Hebrew Republic, Eric Nelson’s short but deeply learned and thought-provoking new book, sets out to resolve what looks like a strange historical paradox. Any standard textbook will tell you that 17th-century England was the birthplace of modern, liberal, secular ways of thinking about politics and government. At a time when England was convulsed by ...

For her part Basha Puah fulminated against their lot with every breath she took, cursing her husband’s irrepressible spirits, though she was herself galvanized by the ghetto’s raucous atmosphere. Despite her violated sense of entitlement, which she never ceased from registering with God and Salo, she was an enterprising woman. By the time their celebrity ...

They were wed on the roadside beneath the tattered canopy of Salo’s prayer shawl by a beggared Galitzianer rabbi in exchange for a glimpse of the Boibiczer Prodigy, of whom the rabbi had heard rumors in his travels. He’d heard that the Prodigy was encased in an immense blue sapphire, and was duly disappointed. For ...