In December 1913, the St. Petersburg-based Society for Jewish Folk Music celebrated its fifth anniversary with a competition for the best Jewish opera. The prize was 3,000 rubles, and the response—as James Loeffler writes in his excellent new study, The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (Yale University Press)—was overwhelming: ...

Faith, it has been said, is the evidence of things not seen. By that definition, to believe in Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, requires no faith at all: It is far easier to see him today, anywhere in the world, than it was when he was actually alive. When the Rebbe died in ...

Earlier this month, in Jerusalem, more than 100,000 haredi Jews took to the streets to protest the Israeli government’s attempt to desegregate an Orthodox girls’ school. The school had been physically separating Ashkenazi and Sephardi students, ostensibly because the latter did not live up to the standards of piety and modesty demanded by parents of ...

A Hebrew map (with the Mediterranean in the foreground) from a 1698 Haggadah published in Amsterdam.
CREDIT: Courtesy of The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary.

In the writing of history, there are no innocent decisions—especially if you are trying to write a compact book about a huge, complex, and polarizing subject, like Michael Brenner’s A Short ...

If you read Tablet and are less than 30 years old, there’s a pretty good chance that you have first-hand knowledge of the subject of Shaul Kelner’s new book, Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage, and Israeli Birthright Tourism (NYU Press). Since it was launched in 1999, the Birthright Israel program has brought hundreds of thousands ...

The most revealing moment in Hitch-22, the new memoir by the writer and controversialist Christopher Hitchens, comes near the end, when he poses to himself the set of questions known to readers of Vanity Fair as the “Proust Questionnaire.” The remarkable thing is not Hitchens’s reply to questions like “Where would you like to live?” ...

By the middle of 2003, as it became clear that the American invasion of Iraq would result not in a quick “mission accomplished” but a long, bloody occupation, a certain narrative of what went wrong began to take root in some corners of the anti-war left. The decision to invade Iraq, this story went, was ...

Of all the qualities that Anthony Julius displays in Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England—intellectual force, extensive erudition, a lucid prose style—the most admirable is surely his moral fortitude. For to write this encyclopedic study, which covers almost a thousand years of English history, Julius had to expose himself to an ...

Irène Némirovsky with Les Nouvelles littéraires c. 1935.
CREDIT: Copyright Roger-Viollet, courtesy Random House
The rediscovery of the French Jewish novelist Irène Némirovsky has been one of the most ironic literary phenomena of recent years. It began with the publication in 2004, to wide acclaim, of Suite Française—a pair of novellas about the fall of France in ...

With the title of his new survey, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History, David B. Ruderman plunges into one of the central debates in the writing of Jewish history. For the most of the last 2,000 years, Jews lived as a small minority among much larger and more powerful civilizations. When we think of ...