Literature

Twelve years after the passing of R. Menachem Froman, his daughter-in-law, the scholar and activist Tchiya Froman, considers R. Froman’s literary critique of the Gush Emunim settlement enterprise and his determination that Judaism requires a feminine revolution.

The debate about Torah u-Madda and pop culture continues. Noah Marlowe argues that Chaim Potok's literature offers a useful conceptual framework for, and embodiment of, a profound confrontation between Judaism and elite elements of general culture.

In this essay, Edelman and Steinberg argue for a literature curriculum that integrates Jewish thought.

A review of Yehoshua November’s The Concealment of Endless Light.

Aryeh Klapper recreating a patriarchal voice.

Bezalel Naor offers a stirring, other-worldly rendition of Rav Kook's poem "The Conversation of the Angels"

Marina Zilbergerts presents the philosophical questions posed by Chaim Grade's “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,” and compares his arguments to those of other major thinkers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche.

In this essay, Brandon Marlon analyzes the presence of Ibn Ezra in the poetry of Robert Browning.

The Agnon scholar, Jeffrey Saks, sees some Agnonian work in modern Israeli literature.

The question of whether or not your writing is Jewish is not up to you, because writing ultimately belongs to the reader. Krauss’ avatar answers Ozick perfectly: “Jewish literature would have to wait, as all Jewish things wait for a perfection that in our hearts we don’t really want to come.” In the end, perhaps all we can do is kvetch and vacillate between different answers to the question of what is Jewish literature—because, of course, the answer was never the point.