Women’s History Month: Pauline Wengeroff, the late-19th-century Russian grandmother and memoirist who saw through the emerging patriarchy in Eastern Europe, was no Betty Friedan
The first Jewish member of Congress was a virulent nativist and anti-immigration troll who ended his life in an insane asylum. He was also acclaimed as the most brilliant orator of his age.
The epiphany that led to a national literature’s single greatest achievement: tucked in a prosaic, newly discovered early novel are the seeds of ‘Leaves of Grass’
In an excerpt from the newly translated Gaslight, by German writer Joachim Kalka, an examination of how the scandal that rocked France bled into European literature
New editions of the enduring scholarly work of Philipp Jaffé, the Polish Jew who was a groundbreaking German medievalist
Notes on the Leonard Milberg collection of early American Judaica, currently at Princeton in the impressive ‘By Dawn’s Early Light’ exhibit
Tracing the birth of ‘Jewish studies’ as we know it
Newly reissued: the underappreciated writer’s 7-volume, multigenerational Gollantz Saga, an epic of 19th-c. European Jewry
An impressive new biography looks at the original Jewish leftist—and shines light on the appeal of radical politics for Jews
Thousands of Jews fled 19th-century Russia for the South American Pampas. Can their unique heritage survive?
Helene Wecker’s new The Golem and the Jinni reads like When Harry Met Sally, if Harry and Sally were beasts
A Yale president’s forebear was an enigmatic and pro-Christian member of the famed rabbinic dynasty
A provocative Paris show of Orientalist art charts the European encounter with Sephardic Jewry
In the late Umberto Eco’s 2010 novel, 19th-century Europe is a land of ominous mystery, and a Parisian junk shop is the passage to a lost world. An excerpt.
A revealing 2011 conversation with Umberto Eco about anti-Semitism in fiction, his novel ‘The Prague Cemetery,’ and the difference between fiction and lies
In 1843, British novelist Grace Aguilar was a household name on both sides of the Atlantic. So how come we’ve never heard of her?
Finding things in common with a boy from old L