In The Mighty Walzer, Howard Jacobson serves up not just the greatest ping-pong novel ever written but a rollicking portrait of mid-century Jewish Manchester

Plus whom Anne Frank belongs to, and more

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.

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.

Friends and Politics, Part 1: Saul Bellow. The Nobel Prize-winner and I shared a love of literature and of Yiddish, but our friendship was tested by decades-long disagreements over politics.

O’Neill, Shteyngart, Prose, and others honor the author

A Bellow twofer, Soviet Jews, and more

Janis Bellow reflects on her late husband’s letter-writing habits, his feelings about his legacy, and what it was like to read over his old love letters

In his letters, Saul Bellow was thoughtful, eloquent, feisty—and quite possibly at his most Jewish

The hero of I.B. Singer’s newly reissued The Magician of Lublin is torn between bohemia and bourgeois respectability, Jews and Gentiles