More in ‘Harvard’

In a Boston Globe column, Jesse Singal articulates the notion that some American Jews may have drifted away from strong support for Israel, or its policies—but not in ways that doom the Democratic Party to shed Jewish voters, or that doom Israel to declining baseline American support.
The premise of the piece—titled “The New American ...

Elisa New, a literature professor at Harvard, never set out to become a Jewish memoirist. Best known, in academic circles at least, as the author of two highly regarded volumes on American poetry, she began her latest book, Jacob’s Cane, a decade ago expecting to write a scholarly history of prosperous, emancipated Jewish merchants who ...

Pairing a pugnacious British intellectual with an American Jewish religious leader for a public conversation on faith must be a lot of people’s idea of fun, because it’s happened in Manhattan two years in a row. The first time around was a bit more raucous: 2,000 people turned out to see Christopher Hitchens and Conservative ...

• Iran’s five-page proposal for holding negotiations with the United States makes no mention of its nuclear weapons program. [ProPublica]
• Egypt and Jordan, which have peace deals with Israel, joined their colleagues in the Arab League in announcing they will not normalize diplomatic ties with Israel until the Palestinian Authority is offered an acceptable final-status ...

• Although Israel has still not agreed to a freeze in settlement growth, there has been no new construction approved since Netanyahu took office. [JTA]
• An Israeli official told The Washington Times that P.M. Benjamin Netanyahu has not broached the topic of a possible attack on Iran with the Obama administration because he suspects the ...

This month, Myron S. Kaufmann’s debut novel, Remember Me to God, turns 50, and so far there have been no signs of celebration. Though it was hailed on publication as one of the finest novels ever written about American Jews and remained on The New York Times bestseller list for an entire year, almost no ...

Ruth R. Wisse
It may seem that there are two Ruth Wisses. One, the eminent Harvard professor of Yiddish and comparative literature, is the author of The Shlemiel as a Modern Hero, and the editor of some half-dozen anthologies of Yiddish prose and poetry, much of which she has translated herself. The other, a political ...