Children

Not-So-Young Adult

With remarkable sensitivity and clarity, Israeli novelist Nava Semel portrays children in Mandate Palestine working as hard as they can to make sense of a post-Holocaust, pre-state limbo.

The Fool and the Assassin

Most movie stars don’t act, they play themselves.  Danny Kaye, the biggest star of all in the 1940s and 1950s, who would have been 100 last month, was different. 

Denominational Delusions

With synagogues closing, congregations ageing, and the non-Orthodox majority dwindling, American Jews are caught in a crisis. Yet no one is tackling the root of this problem: intermarriage.

“Touch not Mine Anointed Ones”

Contemplating what occupies God all day, the Talmud declares that “during the last set of hours, God sits and teaches Torah to children who died untimely deaths.”

The Whole Body

My rabbinic father-in-law and my lay leader mother agree on one thing: no body piercing.  Ears, nose, and bellybutton, all are sacred property on loan from God.

More Expensive by the Dozen

A hundred years ago, industrial efficiency expert Frank Gilbreth, Jr. claimed that children were “cheaper by the dozen.”  Recently the economist Bryan Caplan made the modern version of the self-interested argument for producing more offspring.  In an exclusive feature from the current issue of the Jewish Review of Books, novelist Dara Horn elegantly begs to differ.  —The Editors

I. B. Singer’s Last Laugh

Like millions of his fellow immigrants to America, Isaac Bashevis Singer started over. In the beginning, he was a deadly serious Polish-Yiddish writer with world-literary ambitions.