When Moses Montefiore turned 100, in 1884, England’s chief rabbi composed a special prayer service to mark the event. This liturgy, Abigail Green writes in her deeply impressive new biography Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero (Harvard), was recited by Jews in every corner of the world: “The Jewish Chronicle reported celebrations in Italy, Holland, ...

Dahlia Ravikovitch, who died in 2005 at the age of 69, was one of Israel’s most beloved writers. No other Hebrew poet, Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld remark in their introduction to Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch, with the exception of the late Yehuda Amichai, has been so universally ...

In 1992, at the Republican National Convention, Patrick Buchanan gave one of the most poisonous political speeches of our era. Buchanan, who had run against President Bush as a protest candidate in the Republican primaries, was in Houston to endorse Bush against Bill Clinton in the general election. But the grounds for his endorsement went ...

One of the most memorable episodes in Elias Canetti’s autobiography comes in the second of its three volumes, The Torch in My Ear, in a section titled “The Blowup.” In Canetti’s relationship with his mother, he makes clear, there was no shortage of blow-ups: from the time of his father’s sudden death, when Canetti was ...

If you want to get even more depressed about the prospects for peace in the Middle East, check out a Web page maintained by the Anti-Defamation League that offers excerpts from the Hamas charter. One of the remarkable things about this document is the way it fuses three originally separate varieties of Jew-hatred. The first ...

Yehuda Halevi is best known as a poet, one of the leading lights of the so-called Golden Age of Jewish Spain in the 11th and 12th centuries. But after reading Hillel Halkin’s new book Yehuda Halevi, which will be published this month as part of the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters series, it becomes clear that ...

Reading The Three Weissmanns of Westport, the new novel by Cathleen Schine, is a curious experience. Even as you turn the pages, following the genteel misadventures of the titular clan—the aging mother, Betty Weissmann, and her two middle-aged, lovelorn daughters, Annie and Miranda—the book seems literally insubstantial, as though it is about to melt or ...

In the opening pages of his masterful new study, The Death of the Shtetl, the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer has harsh things to say about the way American Jews remember their ancestors. “In the nineteen-forties and after World War II,” Bauer writes, “unrealistic, saccharine nostalgia took over remembrance of the shtetl, as manifested in the ...

Don’t be fooled by the title and cover design of How to Do Good and Avoid Evil, which conspire to make it look like a run-of-the-mill spirituality or self-help book. The first clue that it is something much more substantial, and provocative, than that is the names of the authors. It is not surprising that ...

Most readers interested in Jewish history know something about the conversos, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews forced to convert to Christianity in the 14th and 15th centuries. In recent decades, historians have come to see their story not just as a tragic or heroic one—an affair of Jews forced to give up their faith, or ...