Reviews

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.

Ilan Fuchs reviews Naomi Seidman’s book Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement.

  Yael Unterman                                              ...

Ben Frogel reviews a new volume that introduces thirty-five different Jewish approaches to virtue ethics and attempts to link them into one continuous tradition.

In advance of Shavuot, Stuart Halpern reviews Reading Ruth, a succinct but poignant new literary commentary on the Book of Ruth, by Leon Kass and his granddaughter Hannah Mandelbaum.

Did the Founding Fathers study Kabbalah? Yisroel Ben-Porat reviews Brian Ogren’s new book Kabbalah and the Founding of America.

Steven Gotlib reviews the magnum opus of legendary Jewish thinker Yitz Greenberg, considering ways in which Greenberg’s newest synthesis of his ideas bring him back into conversation with the Modern Orthodox community.

In this review of Professor Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin's new book on the ideology of exile in the thought of the Safed Kabbalists, Aron Wander unpacks an alternate proposal for Jewish national self-understanding that seeks to elevate, rather than negate, the Jewish people's exilic experiences.

Yosef Lindell Introduction and History of the RCA Siddur If anyone had asked me a year ago whether the Modern Orthodox community in the United States...

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.