Review
Review
Family Ties
For novelist Rona Jaffe, the drive for independence was inculcated in the intimate sphere of the family, where care could look an awful lot like coercion.
Jess Bergman July 18, 2023
Review
Exile in the Interior
In his recently reissued Hebrew novel, Anton Shammas uses the arabesque’s infinity to contest the Zionist enclosures of Palestinian life.
Isabella Hammad July 10, 2023
Review
Who’s Afraid of Absurdity?
A revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s last play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, captures its author’s wry rejection of political nihilism.
Alisa Solomon April 25, 2023
Review
Idlers of the World, Unite!
In Paul Lafargue’s irreverent 1883 pamphlet The Right to Be Lazy, satire is not a tool of glib mockery, but a utopian strategy for imagining another world.
Charlie Tyson March 20, 2023
Review
Entering the DreamSpace
The new manifesto from the Nap Ministry’s Tricia Hersey argues for a vision of rest as politically generative. But what kind of resistance, really, is rest?
Helen Betya Rubinstein March 6, 2023
Review
Shall We Not Revenge?
In his polemic against Germany’s “Theater of Memory”—which relegates Jews to bit parts in the nation’s redemption narrative—poet Max Czollek may have traded one melodrama for another.
Sanders Isaac Bernstein March 3, 2023
Review
Who Will Power the Climate Revolution?
Two new books exemplify divergent approaches to the climate crisis. But who are the revolutionary subjects positioned to enact them?
Dylan Saba February 6, 2023
Review
The Prophet with Eyes
In Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, based on the real life of a self-proclaimed Jewish messiah in 18th-century Poland, theological energy competes with the liberal novel’s finely wrought machinery.
Raphael Magarik November 28, 2022
Review
Attention Must Be Paid
Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt expects us to shed fresh tears at a worn out conclusion.
Alisa Solomon November 18, 2022
Review
A Pantomimed Reckoning
Forty years after the catastrophic invasion of Lebanon, the films of Israel’s “Lebanon Trilogy”—often understood as works of “anti-war cinema”—appear instead as efforts to sidestep accountability.
Hazem Fahmy November 10, 2022
Review
Performative Utterances
In People Love Dead Jews and Jews Don’t Count, Dara Horn and David Baddiel inflame discourses that they claim to find disturbing.
Linda Kinstler October 12, 2022
Review
Second Language
The Belarusian novel Alindarka’s Children, recently translated into Scots and English, considers the political stakes of linguistic inequity.
Yiyun Li September 20, 2022
Review
Terms of Entry
Solmaz Sharif’s Customs probes the boundaries of the social to imagine a we on revolution’s other side.
Claire Schwartz September 12, 2022
Review
World With No Escape
In his final novel, Last Times, Victor Serge achieved the ethical vision that sometimes eluded him in life.
Mitchell Abidor September 7, 2022
Review
More Life
Couples Therapy seeks to portray not just particular couples but the fraught practice of coupledom.
Hannah Black July 27, 2022
Review
Against Impossibility
Who benefits when we decide—or accept—that the splinters of history are “beyond repair”?
Helen Betya Rubinstein June 21, 2022
Review
The Family at Breakfast
Mona Mansour’s Vagrant Trilogy put a subtle, unapologetic portrait of a Palestinian life on a major New York stage.
Ben Gassman June 10, 2022
Review
An Object Not Meant to Object
On The Wayland Rudd Collection
Zoé Samudzi June 6, 2022
Review
Why There’s No Such Thing as a Jewish Gaucho
The Murders of Moisés Ville examines the violence lurking beneath tales of a Jewish utopia in rural Argentina.
Lily Meyer May 10, 2022
Review
How Hollywood Wrote the Story of Israel
A new history misunderstands the American film industry’s role in cementing the US–Israel relationship—and the part Hollywood has played in scripting the tales both states tell about their settler-colonial origins.
Hazem Fahmy April 26, 2022
Review
World War II Revisionism at the Jewish Museum
A new exhibition about Jonas Mekas was an opportunity to confront his wartime record. Instead, it tells a familiar story.
Michael Casper April 21, 2022
Review
Fables of Finitude
In Pure Colour, Sheila Heti asks what it would mean to love the stories that link us to the past without imagining that they will carry us into the future.
Nora Caplan-Bricker March 14, 2022
Review
The Overlooked Loyalties of Ethel Rosenberg
A new biography of the martyr captures the texture of her life and times but fails to fully investigate her political convictions.
Mitchell Abidor March 2, 2022
Review
Biographical Fallacy
In a new biography of Judah P. Benjamin, a Southern Jew who served in the Confederate government, one man’s life can tell us only so much about the American Jewish encounter with slavery.
Richard Kreitner February 3, 2022
