Drowning in the Red Sea

 by RUTH R. WISSE

Gennady Estraikh said, "It is hardly an overstatement to define Yiddish literature of the 1920s as the most pro-Soviet literature in the world." When Arab riots killed 400 Jews in Palestine in late August 1929, the Yiddish communist press found itself torn between sympathy for the fallen and loyalty to the Revolution.

The Rebbe and the Yak

 by ALAN MINTZ

What do you do when your ancestor appears to you in a dream saying that he is trapped inside the body of a Tibetan yak? If you're the Ustiler Rebbe in Haim Be'er's new novel, you go to Tibet to find him, of course.

King James: The Harold Bloom Version

 by HILLEL HALKIN

There may be a thousand facets to the Torah, but does Harold Bloom simply misunderstand the King James Bible?

Next Year on the Rhine

 by ALLAN ARKUSH

Like Newport, Rhode Island, Worms, Germany is the quiet, waterside home to its country's most venerable synagogue—but the similarities stop there.

Minhag America

 by RIV-ELLEN PRELL

Since the founding of the United States, the American "synagoguge" has survived as a flexible institution—some would argue, too flexible.

Red Rosa

 by ADAM KIRSCH

A newly published collection of letters shows a new, softer side of Rosa Luxemburg.

The Birthright Challenge

 by PHILIP GETZ

Eleven years and four books on, can Birthright Israel save diaspora Judaism?

The Nation of Israel?

 by RUTH GAVISON

The case for an Israeli—not Jewish—republic.

The Audacity of Faith

 by YEHUDAH MIRSKY

The career and life of Yehuda Amital—unconventional, unpredictable, and free of clichés.

At the Threshold of Forgiveness: A Study of Law and Narrative in the Talmud

 by MOSHE HALBERTAL

In this season of repentance, it is not only the laws of the rabbis, but their stories as well, that teach us how—and how not—to forgive.

Yo's Blues

 by EITAN KENSKY

For Israeli artist Yoram Kaniuk, the bohemian world of Billie Holiday, Marlon Brando, and James Agee had a lot to offer, but not enough.

Freedom Riders

 by ESTHER SCHOR

There is nothing subtle about the theme that runs throughout Philadelphia's National Museum of American Jewish History.

Marginalia

 by ELLI FISCHER, SHAI SECUNDA

Israeli director Joseph Cedar's new film Footnote was anything but that at the Cannes Film Festival, despite its setting in the Hebrew University Talmud department.

What is a Jew? The Answer of the Maccabees

 by ABBA HILLEL SILVER

In 1958, David Ben-Gurion sent a letter to fifty Jewish leaders around the world, asking, "Who is a Jew?" He had good political reasons to launch such an inquiry, and equally good reasons to expect answers or attempts at answers. Isaiah Berlin wrote back, and so did the Jewish scholar Alexander Altmann, the novelist S.Y. Agnon, and the Lubavitcher Rebbe, as well as many others. But Abba Hillel Silver, the prominent Reform rabbi and American Zionist leader who had represented the Jewish Agency before the United Nations a decade earlier did not respond to Ben-Gurion's missive—not directly, anyhow.

Letters

Hank Greenberg & Neo-Orthodoxy, or Non-Orthodoxy?

Exchange

 by SHARON FLATTO, ALLAN NADLER

Kabbalah in 18th-Century Prague: A Response & Rejoinder.

Quibbles

 by ABRAHAM SOCHER

Harry Wolfson, Reinhold Niebuhr, and chutzpah.