Most Jews—and many Democrats—believe Bernie Sanders is a dangerous radical
With a vote for BDS, one part of the left heads for oblivion
The case of Judith Clark
Lionel Trilling saw Isaac Babel as he imagined or wanted Eastern European Jews to be, not as he really was
‘The Odd Woman and the City’ proves the memoirist is a peer of Kazin, Howe, and other great chroniclers of Jewish America
New novels answer Irving Howe’s question: Can we accept aesthetic pleasure in a book about the Shoah?
What role does America play in Jewish life, and by extension what kind of Jewish literature can be created here?
Shivah Stars
The edited typescript of “Eichmann in Jerusalem” reveals New Yorker editor William Shawn’s meticulous work
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.
I.J. Singer’s newly reissued The Brothers Ashkenazi may not be on par with the greatest realist epics, but it is an eerie foretelling of Eastern European Jewry’s eventual fate
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
We are all Rashi’s heirs, but what, exactly, is our inheritance?
Jewish writers and writing of the (last) Depression
What a 1942 essay contest revealed about immigrants’ lives, in the Old World and the New
