Jewish Review of Books

Jews around the world (but not very many others) have condemned the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s selection of Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, who has denounced Israel as a perpetrator of genocide, as this year’s winner of the Peace Prize. The American Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations has declared that the Nobel Committee has “diminished the legacy of the prize ...

On Friday, September 18, while most Jews were preparing for Yom Kippur, the Jewish-Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz received bad news from the Granada’s famous literary and arts festival, CULTUR-ALH. Harwicz, whose debut Die, My Love was recently adapted into a film starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, had been invited to participate in a series of convers...

Sergeant Itay Amar was nineteen when he fell in combat in the southern Gaza Strip in June 2024, along with seven of his peers. After receiving his locked iPhone among his belongings, his mother, Lorin, tried to open it, insisting he must have left some kind of message behind. “He left one . . . I know my son. That’s what he was like his whole life, keeping me posted. It could...

As My glory passes by . . . I will cover you with My hand until I have passed by. And I will take away My hand and you will see My back; but My face will not be seen” (Ex. 33:22–23). The Torah paints a wonderfully vivid scene. But of what? Moses in the cleft of a rock—but with what exactly passing by? What is this divine face that passes before Moses “that no human being can ...

Ages ago, or so it now seems, American Jewry experienced its very own Great Awakening. Beginning in the 1970s and crescendoing in the 1990s, thousands of young, well-educated men and women, largely the products of the suburbs, forsook the practices of their parents and embraced traditional Jewish beliefs and rituals. A network of brand-new institutions and initiatives sprang ...