Reviews

Did the Founding Fathers derive their biblical values from the Hebrew Bible, or just the Old Testament? Yisroel Ben-Porat reviews "Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land."

Zvi Grumet reviews Aaron Koller’s new book on the Akedah and evaluates his surprisingly novel approach to this formative biblical story.

Steven Gotlib reviews Roberta Rosenthal Kwall’s book Remix Judaism, which has an important message about navigating Jewish practice in the modern world for non-Orthodox and Orthodox Jews alike.

It has been six years since Rav Aharon Lichtenstein passed away. In reviewing a 2018 collection of essays by Rav Lichtenstein’s students, Alan Jotkowitz reflects on what we have lost and the void that remains.

Howard Apfel reviews Sacred Training: A Halakhic Guidebook for Medical Students and Residents.

David Fried reviews Diana Lobel's Moses and Abraham Maimonides: Encountering the Divine, which argues that the categorization of Moses Maimonides as an Aristotelian philosopher and his son Abraham as a Sufi mystic is an oversimplification.

Aaron Segal reviews Staying Human by Harris Bor.

Laurance Wieder's After Adam was named the Book of the Year in 2019 by First Thing's John Wilson, but has been largely overlooked in the Jewish community. The Jewish Review of Book's Michal Leibowitz seeks to remedy this in her review of Wieder's lyrical retelling of the Bible.

Joshua Leifer’s new book illustrates the collapse of several paradigms that long sustained American Jewish life. In his review, Steven Gotlib notes that Leifer’s search for a viable, non-separatist, traditional Judaism overlooks several existing models of Jewish life and practice.

Yaakov Taubes examines three hypothetical “What if?” books and what they can teach us about history, science, and halakhah.