Gary Shteyngart’s new memoir is a touching meditation on the origins, nature, and limits of humor

Putting Lolita‘s famous creep through an exegesis

A friendship with an ambassador reveals the great writer’s surprising relationship with Israel

While Orthodox girls obsess about skirt length and hosiery choices, are we overlooking Judaism’s most important lessons about modesty?

Plus Mr. Pogrom, raging Sukkot battle, and more

In his novel The Vices, Lawrence Douglas spins a Nabokovian web of intrigue and self-deception that hints at the way Jewish identity is constructed and performed

Jews have always been keen on joining revolutions. Some revolutionaries, like Emma Goldman, sought to change the minds of workers; others, like Richard Feynman, looked to change our understanding of matter.

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

The poet Joseph Brodsky, kicked out of the USSR and never fully at ease writing in English, was a man of many residences and few homes, as a new biography shows

Doctorow and Oz have a chance; Jacobson remains underdog