Draft of History
Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” is known as a New Yorker article, but the book version, still in print, didn’t include William Shawn’s edits. A look at the edited typescript reveals his meticulous work.
The Pugilist
Friends and Politics, Part 3: Norman Podhoretz. The neoconservative icon and I weren’t personally close, but we shared a more important bond, over the struggle to defend Israel and American Jewry.
The Socialist
Friends and Politics, Part 2: Irving Howe. The prominent critic and I worked on Yiddish translations together, but a dispute over Israel and its Arab neighbors ruptured our relationship—until we reconnected over literature.
Imaginative Assault
An excerpt from a new history of Commentary shows how the fiction published in the magazine’s early years shook not just the world of Jewish literature but the very foundations of American letters
Words of Our Fathers
What a 1942 essay contest revealed about immigrants’ lives, in the Old World and the New
Ben-Gurion
Cheap Eats
An entrepreneur opened a Jewish-themed restaurant in Lviv, Ukraine. Chopped liver is on the menu, but not its price—diners get to haggle over it.
Grace Notes
Orthodox klezmer and bluegrass virtuoso Andy Statman and evangelical country star Ricky Skaggs cross genres and faiths to form a mighty duo
Goodbye to All That
For generations, the Jews of Caracas had idyllic weather, prosperity, and vibrant communal organizations. Things have changed under Hugo Chávez.
