The British composer Thomas Adès, the son of Syrian-Jewish immigrants to the United Kingdom, leads an operatic adaption of Luis Buñuel’s surrealist film into a biblical trap
A casualty of a naïve belief in Israel’s potential to adopt a secular Hebrew culture beyond Judaism’s defining religious difference, the Russian-born writer was also revived as a feminist icon in the 1970s
A ‘wonderful’ new collection of Yehuda Amichai’s verse shows the poet’s profound resilience—and the weight of his ghosts
New research in the ongoing academic debate says no
Featuring Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, and Idan Raichel
A review of Halkin’s ‘Melisande! What are Dreams?’
In a recent performance of Schubert’s and Schumann’s settings of Heinrich Heine’s poetry, tenor Ian Bostridge and pianist Thomas Adès excelled
Comment of the Week
In a whole new font!
Type designer Scott-Martin Kosofsky explains the creation of Le Bé, his new digitization of a beautiful 16th-century Hebrew typeface. It debuts in The Selected Poems of Yehuda Halevi, a Nextbook Press e-book published this week.
There are two stories of Germany and Jews: the culture of assimilated German Jews and the meeting of German culture with Jewish religion
Does history live up to the Islamic center’s ideal?
The Ground Zero Islamic center was named for a period in Spanish-Muslim history that some call a golden age of tolerance
The latest ‘Jewish Review of Books’
“Hillel Halkin has done a superb job in responding to these challenges in what is, in my view, his best book.”
And the song’s Yehuda Halevi connection
Read Susan Comninos’ poem
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