It was going to be a Shabbat to remember. After a long week of work at Tablet Magazine, I was looking forward to leaving the Jews behind and focusing instead on the ghosts. I left the office Friday afternoon, dashed over to my favorite video game store, and bought a copy of “Ghostbusters: The Video ...

If you’re a historian, or even if you just play one on TV, you’re keenly aware that one of the convenient aspects of Jewish history is a 3,000-year-old paper trail—material that has allowed Jewish historians to poke and probe the texts of the rabbinical and intellectual elite that crafted the contours of Jewish law and ...

The ten plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, the drowning of Pharaoh and his army. Barbara Sivertsen delved into the geological record and came up with a new theory that explains them all. She’s the managing editor of the Journal of Geology, and her new book is called The Parting of ...

Last week, in one major American city, time began to move backwards.
If you happened to be in Austin, and paid close attention to the throngs of 20-year-olds who covered the town like locusts clad in ironic T-shirts, you may have gotten the impression that the earth had just begun spinning in reverse, that the economic ...

Maybe they’re earnest attempts to help people fit eight nights of Hanukkah observance into their busy lives. Or maybe they’re just an irresistible opportunity to exploit some nifty technology. Either way, three new iPhone applications—all downloadable from iTunes—make it easy to light a menorah wherever you happen to be. As a service to you, dear ...

Toward the end of Dreams with Sharp Teeth, a new documentary about the science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, his friend and fellow fantasist Neil Gaiman attempts to sum up Ellison, who has, over the course of his seventy-four years, written millions of words, won dozens of awards for his short stories and teleplays, married five ...

During bar mitzvah studies with my heavyset, hirsute rabbi, I often asked questions that weren’t on script for a twelve-year-old. I grew up in a mainly secular home, and had a private belief in God, not one formed by ritual or liturgy. My faith was a preadolescent fantasy, having more in common with my obsessive ...