A Tale of Two Synagogues

 by DAVID GELERNTER

Frank Lloyd Wright built a dazzling temple outside Philadelphia. Too bad he didn’t look closely at the synagogue of Gwoździec, Poland, built two hundred years earlier.

The Kibbutz, Post-Utopia

 by WALTER LAQUEUR

One hundred years ago, Yosef Bussel, Yosef Baratz, eight other young men, and two young women arrived in Umm Juni on the southern shore of Lake Tiberias. There they established a kommuna, a small agricultural settlement that was to become the first kibbutz. A new Hebrew book celebrates the centennial history of this great experiment.

How Goodly Are Your Tents, O Tel Aviv? A Symposium

 by STAV SHAFFIR, NOAH EFRON, RAN BARATZ, LILI BEN-AMI, OMER MOAV, AARON LEIBOWITZ, ORIT ROZIN

Overshadowed by the more earth-shaking or at least highly publicized events elsewhere, the "Tent City Protests" that began in Tel Aviv last summer have been forgotten by many outside of Israel. Nonetheless, they were extraordinary both in size-on September 3 as many as 450,000 marched throughout Israel-and civility. We thought that it would be useful to listen to what some thoughtful and involved Israelis are saying about what they saw or did last summer in the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Secularism and Sabbateans

 by DAVID BIALE

How did the Jews become modern? Three new books trace the roots of Jewish secularization.

Untrue Blood

 by GLENN DYNNER

There was a common idea behind ritual murder and host desecration accusations: Jews were imagined to be re-enacting the crucifixion.

Eco's Elders of Zion

 by GARY SAUL MORSON

Umberto Eco's new novel highlights—or exemplifies—the real history of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, intertwined as it is with bad fiction.

No Tips

 by CHRISTOPHER NADON

Yale's Jewish Lives Series finds an unlikely subject: Leon Trotsky.

Jewish Identity and Its Discontents

 by ALLAN ARKUSH

Two philosophies—one analytical, the other amorous—of the modern Jewish condition.

Walkers in the City

 by STUART SCHOFFMAN

Herman Melville was unimpressed with Jerusalem in 1857, but what would he say if he were a saunterer on Mamilla or King George today?

A Murder in Queens

 by ALANNA E. COOPER

The murder conviction of Marina Borukhova in 2008 shocked the Bukharan Jewish community of Forest Hills. But many questions remain unanswered.

Sincere Irony

 by MICHAH GOTTLIEB

In a new book about religious moderation, William Egginton makes some good points, along with a few immoderate claims.

The Jewish Turn of Norman Podhoretz

 by ERIC COHEN

A new biography charts the rise of Norman Podhoretz, from a young voice of the anti-Communist left, to a leading neoconservative and American Zionist.

Starving for Zion

 by GIDEON SHIMONI

For Chaim Gans, the justification for nationalism in general, and Zionism in particular, lies in the human rights of the individual.

The Rock from Which They Were Cleft

 by DAVID ELLENSON

In the past few years, Member of Knesset Rabbi Haim Amsalem has has become more of a controversial figure in his own community, not to mention the Shas party he represents, than outside of it. In two monumental works of Jewish law, he seeks to impact the future not only of that community, but of Israel's Russian immigrants.

Anita and the Wolf

 by WILLIAM KOLBRENNER

A new Argentinian film sheds light on living with Down Syndrome.

Letters

Curating Assimilation, Rav and the Butchers & the Bergson Boys.

The Wages of Criticism

 by ZEV ELEFF

The great 18^th-century talmudist Rabbi Aryeh Leib Ginsburg never whitewashed his disagreements with other scholars, claiming that most "ruined good paper and ink and embarassed the Torah." According to a popular rabbinic legend, his downfall came when, in an act of cutting vengance, the books he had criticized came toppling upon him. But recent accounts of the story seem to whitewash the message.