Books

Books

Founding Document

A new book argues for the enduring significance of the 1917 Balfour Declaration
By Adam Kirsch

  • Books

    Holiday Books

    High Holiday prayerbooks of every stripe
    By Josh Lambert

  • Books

    Eschatologist

    Jacob Taubes, a leading midcentury Jewish intellectual, wrestled with the weightiest questions of religion and politics
    By Noah B. Strote

  • Audio

    Some People

    In a spoken excerpt from her new memoir, Rachel Shukert recounts the final days of a European romance
    By Vox Tablet

More in Books

Books

Hareloom

A memoir uses a collection of Japanese figurines to offer a glimpse into one of prewar Europe's leading Jewish families
By Adam Kirsch | 7:00 AM Aug 24, 2010

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 ...

Books

On the Bookshelf

Of arms and men
By Josh Lambert | 7:00 AM Aug 23, 2010

Readers: Even covering 8-10 titles each week, On the Bookshelf doesn’t always mention every book of Jewish interest that has been published. In the hopes of atoning to wronged authors and readers, On the Bookshelf’s Yom Kippur column will highlight a selection of such neglected titles. If you’ve noticed a deserving book that has been ...

Books

Unsettling

The Settlers offers a gloomy view of how continued occupation of the West Bank will affect Israel and Zionism
By Adam Kirsch | 7:00 AM Aug 17, 2010

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, ...

Books

On the Bookshelf

Burning questions on the Cold War
By Josh Lambert | 7:00 AM Aug 16, 2010

Feeling overheated? Take a refreshing dip in the Cold War. When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, September), by Tablet contributing editor and former Columbia Journalism Review staffer Gal Beckerman, weaves the efforts to free the Russian refuseniks into a dramatic narrative, emphasizing how ...

Books

Convert’s Tale

A new study assesses the 12th-century memoir attributed to 'Herman the former Jew'
By Adam Kirsch | 7:00 AM Aug 10, 2010

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 ...

Books

On the Bookshelf

Jews of Madison Avenue, Jews of Broadway
By Josh Lambert | 7:00 AM Aug 9, 2010

Like Mad Men itself, the modern American advertising industry wouldn’t exist, at least not in its current form, without a few key Jewish innovators. As Jeffrey Cruikshank and Arthur Schultz demonstrate in The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century (Harvard Business ...