On October 31, 1917, the British Cabinet approved a one-sentence statement of policy regarding its plans for Palestine, which the British Army was just then in the process of conquering away from the Ottoman Empire: “His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will ...

In 1943, Hannah Arendt reviewed the memoirs of Stefan Zweig, one of the leading literary figures of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Like the vast majority of those figures—the playwrights and journalists, psychoanalysts and art collectors who made the Austro-Hungarian capital perhaps the most sophisticated city in the world—Zweig was Jewish. But this Jewish golden age was always ...

Anyone who has been concerned or angered by the debate over the future of liberal Zionism, sparked by Peter Beinart’s much-discussed article in the New York Review of Books, should hurry to read The Settlers (Yale University Press), the new book by the Israeli journalist and professor Gadi Taub. At the center of Taub’s short, ...

Sometime in the 12th century CE, at the monastery of Cappenberg in western Germany, a fascinating and enigmatic document was produced. Its Latin title, Opusculum de conversione sua, means “A Short Work About his Conversion,” and it is attributed to Hermannus quondam Judaeus—“Herman the former Jew.” What makes this work especially significant, writes Jean-Claude Schmitt ...

Hans Keilson is not entirely unknown in America. His most important book, the autobiographical novel The Death of the Adversary, was published here in 1962, and was named one of Time magazine’s best books of the year. Among psychologists, he is also known for his seminal research on the psychology of traumatized children, particularly Holocaust ...

In December 1913, the St. Petersburg-based Society for Jewish Folk Music celebrated its fifth anniversary with a competition for the best Jewish opera. The prize was 3,000 rubles, and the response—as James Loeffler writes in his excellent new study, The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (Yale University Press)—was overwhelming: ...

Faith, it has been said, is the evidence of things not seen. By that definition, to believe in Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, requires no faith at all: It is far easier to see him today, anywhere in the world, than it was when he was actually alive. When the Rebbe died in ...

Earlier this month, in Jerusalem, more than 100,000 haredi Jews took to the streets to protest the Israeli government’s attempt to desegregate an Orthodox girls’ school. The school had been physically separating Ashkenazi and Sephardi students, ostensibly because the latter did not live up to the standards of piety and modesty demanded by parents of ...

A Hebrew map (with the Mediterranean in the foreground) from a 1698 Haggadah published in Amsterdam.
CREDIT: Courtesy of The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary.

In the writing of history, there are no innocent decisions—especially if you are trying to write a compact book about a huge, complex, and polarizing subject, like Michael Brenner’s A Short ...

If you read Tablet and are less than 30 years old, there’s a pretty good chance that you have first-hand knowledge of the subject of Shaul Kelner’s new book, Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage, and Israeli Birthright Tourism (NYU Press). Since it was launched in 1999, the Birthright Israel program has brought hundreds of thousands ...