Love and War

 by ALAN MINTZ

David Grossman has for sometime been one of Israel's most talented and important writers. In many of his novels, his feeling for adolescence—one is tempted to say, his identification with it—has been so brilliantly intuitive that the imagining of adulthood has scarcely been possible. In To the End of the Land, Grossman makes his breakthrough.

The Chabad Paradox

 by ABRAHAM SOCHER

Despite its tiny numbers, the Hasidic group known as Chabad or Lubavitch has transformed the Jewish world. Not only the most successful contemporary Hasidic sect, it might be the most successful Jewish religious movement of the second half of the twentieth century. But two new books raise provocative questions about it.

Lamed-Vovnik

 by RUTH FRANKLIN

André Schwarz-Bart's posthumous The Morning Star goes where no Holocaust novel has gone before.

In Brief

Hirsch’s poems, Illion’s lions, short prayers, Tommy Lapid & more.

Palestine Portrayed

 by ITAMAR RABINOVICH

The 1948 War and the problems it left unresolved have returned to the top of the agenda for both diplomats and historians.

Misreading Kafka

 by PAUL REITTER

The Kafka myths, and the "myth-busters" who make them.

The One and the Many

 by JON D. LEVENSON

A popular new book deals with differences between the world's religions, but misses the mark in several of them.

Hidden Master

 by DANIEL LANDES

The closer we look at Green's theology, the more radical it turns out to be.

Let My People Go

 by YEHUDAH MIRSKY

Many of the heroes of the Soviet Jewry movement have been unsung, until now.

Dirty Hands in Difficult Times

 by ALLAN ARKUSH

Israel's relationship with apartheid South Africa is an inconvenient—perhaps unavoidable—truth.

The Bible Scholar Who Didn't Know Hebrew

 by ANTHONY GRAFTON

The surprising story of Elias Bickerman and his scholarship.

Early Modern Mingling

 by MOSHE ROSMAN

How the Jews became modern.

Trilling, Babel, and the Rabbis

 by ADAM KIRSCH

When The Middle of the Journey was published in 1947, one of the criticisms made of the novel was that Lionel Trilling had erred in not making his characters Jewish. The intellectual circles in which Trilling moved in the 1930s and 1940s, where he found the originals of the novel's fellow-traveling liberals, were largely made up of first-generation American Jews, like himself. 

Proverbs 8:22-31

 by ROBERT ALTER

Many have marveled at the wisdom of the biblical books attributed to King Solomon. Here, in a new translation by Robert Alter, is Proverbs' account of the birth of Wisdom herself, from The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes: A Translation with Commentary, now out with Norton.

Temporary Measures: Sukkah City

 by SHARI SAIMAN

A Measure of Beauty

 by AZZAN YADIN-ISRAEL

The Israeli hip-hop band Hadag Nahash blend the many strata of Hebrew language.

When Eve Ate the Etrog: A Passage from Tsena-Urena

 by MORRIS M. FAIERSTEIN

There was once a custom for a pregnant woman to bite off the tip of the etrog at the end of Sukkot. This excerpt includes the text of a Yiddish prayer, or tkhine, that the pregnant woman is instructed to recite based on an interpretation of Genesis 3:6.

Letters

Defending Steinberg, Spy Stories, and Rashi & Richard the Lionheart.

Prague Summer: The Altneuschul, Pan Am, and Herbert Marcuse

 by SHLOMO AVINERI

A mysterious memoir of planes, Marx, and minyans.