An excerpt from Chaim Weizmann: A Biography On the fifth of Iyar 5708, Friday, May 14, 1948, four in the afternoon in Tel Aviv, nine in the morning in New York, the Provisional State Council convened in the Tel Aviv Museum to declare that an independent Jewish state would come into existence and that the council would then reconstitute itself as the Provisional Government of Israel. Chaim Weizmann, seventy-four years old, ill and both physically and mentally exhausted, received the news in his room at the Waldorf Astoria, which was kept dark because he could not bear the light. He sprawled on ..read more

In the summer semester of 1982 I used to go to the English Garden in Munich rather than my seminar on Thomas Mann. I got up late, showered, and cycled to the Eisbach canal. The others would be there already. We listened to Heaven 17 on our Walkmans, we discussed Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel, and the beads of sweat on the girls’ arms dried quickly in the sun. In the afternoon I sat at my desk at home, closed the window, which I had covered with newspaper, and wrote a few pages. Three months later I’d finished: two hundred pages, my first novel. I took it to Israel with me so that my sister c ..read more

On October 18, 1899, on the front page of the Warsaw Hebrew daily, Hatzfirah, a physician and book collector named Joseph Chasanowich published a lengthy call to erect a library in Jerusalem: I say that in Jerusalem there will be built a grand house . . . high and lofty, in which will be gathered all the fruits of Israel’s spirit, from the moment it became a nation. All the books written in Hebrew, and all the books in all the languages that discuss Jews and their teachings, all the writings and the paintings that touch upon their lives. Everything, everything, will be collected in this great ..read more

Marilynne Robinson’s God makes surprising sense. Not that her conception of God is simple. Long before Robinson published her new commentary of the book of Genesis, she and her characters were mindful of its unpredictable God. Early in her magnificent novel Gilead, for instance, the old preacher John Ames recalls a harrowing journey he took with his father through Kansas in 1892, in the midst of a drought, to find his grandfather’s grave: There were times when I truly believed we might just wander off and die. Once when my father was gathering sticks for firewood into my arms, he said we were ..read more

The Babylonian Talmud is the largest and arguably the most important work on the Jewish bookshelf. Its 37 tractates and more than 2,700 folios preserve an immense body of legislation, legal analysis, and court cases, alongside a wealth of biblical interpretation, rabbinic stories and sayings, and much more. But we know surprisingly little about the people who produced the Talmud and their history. We lack basic knowledge of the relationship between Babylonian Jewry and the Persian dynasty, known as the Sasanian empire, that ruled over the region. We also do not really understand the connection ..read more

At five o’clock in the afternoon, in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom finds himself in a Dublin pub, arguing over the meaning of life with a band of incredulous Christians. In an impromptu speech decrying “‘force, hatred, history and all that,’” Joyce’s wandering Jew blurts out his philosophy: “‘Love,’ says Bloom, ‘I mean the opposite of hatred.’” Shai Held’s new book, Judaism Is about Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life, is not a stammered tautology but an elaborate treatise, blending polemic and apologetics with theological insight and moral exhortation. But, at heart, it makes the ..read more

The Yiddish instructor brought out a box of cutout paper letters and asked his teaching assistant to arrange them in alphabetical order inside a plastic box. The assistant struggled a bit. The instructor, whom I will call Mikołaj, turned to me and said, “You know the alphabet. Can you help us?” We were speaking to each other mostly in Yiddish with a little English when we hit a roadblock in our understanding. “Sure,” I said, wondering how he was going to use them. I was in Białystok, Poland, to explore my maternal grandmother’s hometown. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Bi ..read more

When Zsuzsika Rubin was four years old, her mother, Lilly, took her to a photographer’s portrait studio, where she wore different outfits and hairstyles and struck poses with props: as an all-grown-up lady doing her “daily shopping” with a plush dog and a straw basket, as a housewife in an apron hovering over a little toy stove. The two shots became postcards, one sent to Lilly’s sister Magda in France, another to her brother Izsó, who was in a forced-labor camp in Zircz in northwestern Hungary. The postcard to Izsó is undated, but the one to Magda—who had not yet met her niece—is dated Februa ..read more

The story behind everyone's favorite Pesach mnemonic ..read more

George Orwell is best known for his antitotalitarian novels, but his true genius lay in the incomparably clear and urgent morality of his journalism. We could use some of that now ..read more