Literature

Jewishness, antisemitism, popular culture and Russian television in the postwar era? Historian Maya Balakirsky Katz explains.

Jeffrey Kobrin comments on the work and influence of Herman Wouk.

What do you get when you read George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda alongside Rav Soloveitchik’s Kol Dodi Dofek? A cross between Zionism and feminism, argues Eileen Watts.

Daniel Klein on how violence in the Bible plays out in the writings of Shadal and Gabriel Gárcia Márquez

Haim Watzman's short story, which previously appeared in Hebrew in the National Library of Israel's literary magazine, explores the grief and confusion of wartime in Jerusalem.

In the next finalist installment from our short story competition, Lior Zoë Perets’ period fiction explores the rabbinic instruction to “rise up and strike first.”

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.

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

Ariel Clark Silver describes how Queen Esther’s story inspired women’s rights activist Louisa May Alcott’s short fable of an Aster who wisely ruled the kingdom of the flowers.

Eileen Watts explores how Bernard Malamud's "The German Refugee" amplifies the themes of Tisha B'Av.