Reviews

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.

Steven Gotlib reviews Raphael Zarum’s Questioning Belief: Torah and Tradition in an Age of Doubt.

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.

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

What theological language can we use to describe our current pandemic moment? In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Jeremy Brown takes scope of the ancient and modern notions of plague theodicy and reviews some ideas from the 2021 National Jewish Book Award Winner Torah in a Time of Plague.