Personalities

Math and Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union Edward Frenkel, New Criterion. A leading mathematician recalls anti-Semitic university admissions in the USSR.

The Man Who Stood Alone Matti Friedman, Times of Israel. Yitzhak Shamir fled Poland for Palestine, determined to live his commitment to Jewish self-reliance.  He did so with unswerving vision, until his death this past Saturday. 

Nora Knows What to Do Ariel Levy, New Yorker. “Those endless women-in-film panels. It’s, like, just do it! Just do it . . . It’s my ongoing argument with a whole part of the women’s movement.”  A profile of Nora Ephron, who died yesterday at age seventy-one. (2009)

Scholarship at the Fault Line Monica Osborne, New Republic. English departments and literary studies curricula have yet to acknowledge the significance of Jewish and midrashic thought to their disciplines.