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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...