Roth Redux

Philip Roth’s defenders point to his later, more serious works to argue for his place in the canon. In truth, those books make clearer his weaknesses.

Goldstone Continues Public Psychodrama

South African judge, of notorious Goldstone Report, rejects ‘apartheid’ charge

Sundown: Occupy Yom Kippur

Plus some reading for when you’re not eating

Pilgrim’s Progress

Creating Jewishness in a post-religious age: Leon Uris’ Exodus and S.Y. Agnon’s Only Yesterday paint Israel’s history in broad and fine strokes

‘Commentary’ Archive Heads to Texas

Ransom Center in Austin is a hotbed of Jewish literary papers

Growing Pains

The writer Delmore Schwartz is largely forgotten today, but he once captured the anxieties and hopes of the Jewish intellectuals of the 1930s and stunned his generation with his poems and short stories

Dreamer

Delmore Schwartz, once one of America’s most celebrated writers, died mad and forgotten, having produced little in his later life. His story remains a compelling cautionary tale for American Jews.

Rough Draft

Alfred Kazin’s journals were more than just repositories for literary reflections; they were the laboratories in which he fashioned the writer—and Jew—he aspired to be

The Gimpel With a Song in His Heart

Huppah Dreams

Less Interesting Jewish Books

Thank God we have better stuff to read