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ALTHOUGH THE WORLD and the new Obama administration continue to pin their hopes on it, a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would involve the removal of all Jewish [...]

ON JUNE 6, 1982, following the collapse of a year-long truce between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the Israeli army invaded a Lebanon torn by years of civil war. [...]

LAST OCTOBER 9, the evening of Yom Kippur, Jewish-Arab riots broke out in the Israeli coastal city of Acre. They began with the stoning by Jewish youths of an Arab [...]

Kosher Demons Leaves from the Garden of Eden: One Hundred Classic Jewish Tales by Howard Schwartz Oxford. 544 pp. $34.95 COLLECTIONS OF Jewish tales, of which Howard Schwartz, a professor [...]

EIGHT YEARS ago, I published an article in these pages called 'Wandering Jews--and Their Genes' (September 2000). At the time I was working on a book about a Tibeto-Burmese ethnic [...]

AS ANYONE following the campaign rhetoric of Barack Obama and his supporters will have noticed, this has been a season for 'repairing the world.' It is also a time, then, [...]

MY FIRST paid translation went unpaid. It was commissioned by an Israeli writer named Matti Megged, who, in 1959 or '60, toured America on a grant from a U.S. foundation [...]

Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present by Michael B. Oren Norton. 672pp. $35.00 ALTHOUGH THE writing of history comes in infinite hues, these [...]

WHY WOULD the reader of a slim volume of short stories by an American Jewish writer he has never read before jump from the bed on which he has been [...]

ON AUGUST 12, two days before the ceasefire in Lebanon took hold, Ari Shavit, a prominent Israeli journalist and contributor to the New Yorker, published an opinion piece in the [...]

IF WE CAN'T stay eternally youthful for ourselves--'for ever panting and for ever young,' as Keats put it in his 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'--we can at least stay that [...]

ALTHOUGH MODERN archeology is a reasonably rigorous scientific discipline, it is subject to non-scientific constraints. In the first place, it is expensive. To excavate a small area whose earliest strata [...]

The Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918-1975 edited by Seamus Cooney Black Sparrow. 400 pp. $45.00 (hardcover), $21.95 (paperback) CHARLES REZNIKOFF (1894-1976) described his own poetry, which has undergone something of [...]

TO THE EDITOR: Hillel Halkin is apparently under the illusion that the mass expulsion of Jews from their homes in further acts of 'disengagement' is a sound alternative for Israel [...]

The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine Princeton. 344 pp. $29.95 THE EQUATION of Jewishness with the quintessence of modernity, the central thesis of Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century, is hardly [...]

I FIRST SET foot on the island of Ithaca by swimming ashore. This was not how it was done by Odysseus, who was carried from a ship in early dawn [...]

IT WAS necessary, it would seem, for the disengagement from Gaza to take place for the strategy behind it to be revealed as unworkable. That strategy was based on two [...]

The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege by Kenneth Levin Smith & Kraus. 571 pp. $35.00 IT HAS long been obvious to all but the incurably or willfully [...]

THE 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, writes the American scholar Alan Mintz, was 'pivotal' in turning the Holocaust from 'a topic barely spoken of in public discourse' into 'one of [...]

IMAGINE THE following: it is the year 150 C.E. or thereabouts. After a prolonged conflict within the Jewish community of Palestine and its many offshoots around the Mediterranean, the believers [...]

TO THE EDITOR: In purporting to analyze 'the most severe political crisis' in Israel's brief history, Hillel Halkin focuses on the influence of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook and his [...]

IN A Tale of Love and Darkness, his highly praised novelistic memoir of a Jerusalem childhood and adolescence in the 1940's and 50's, * Amos Oz mentions my uncle, the [...]

THE HEBREW Bible is not the first known work in history to have been translated; that honor goes to one of several Sumerian narrative poems, like the Gilgamesh epic or [...]

THE FIRST to have ventured, Cynthia Ozick remains in a class by herself. It was in 1966 that she published, in the relatively obscure Hudson Review, her story 'The Pagan [...]

WHAT ARE we to think of the 'Geneva Accord,' also known as the 'Geneva Initiative,' whose gala kick-off was held in Switzerland on December 1? At first labeled a public-relations [...]

Man trakht un got lakht: man thinks and God laughs, the Yiddish saying goes. I grew up thinking of Yiddish as an enemy and am now (among other things) a [...]

The Prophets: Who They Were, What They Are by Norman Podhoretz Free Pres. 390 pp. $30.00 NORMAN PODHORETZ, whose eminence as a literary, cultural, and political critic hardly needs reviewing [...]

THE SETTLEMENTS! If only they didn't exist! If only Israel understood the folly of them! They have been a ruinous drain on its resources, a flagrant violation of international law, [...]

'I HAVE awakened to anti-Semitism these days,' wrote the American Jewish author Jonathan Rosen in an article in the New York Times Magazine last November. An odd statement for someone [...]

Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman Behind the Legend by John E. Miller Missouri. 306pp. $29.95 PERHAPS IT is impossible to assess children's authors with any precision. Literary taste gets [...]

'How obvious,' one sometimes thinks of a new idea, thus bestowing high praise on its conceiver, since nothing is so well hidden as the obvious. James L. Kugel, a professor [...]

ABOUT 30 years have passed since the formal introduction of Jewish studies as an academic discipline on American campuses, and the change has been great. Whereas in the 1950's the [...]

Saul Bellow's new novella, the critics agree, is not one of his major works. As James Wood put it in the New Republic, The Actual,(*) while having 'its own nervous [...]

Three years ago I wrote a harsh review for the weekly Forward of a book called The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust by Tom Segev, an Israeli journalist [...]

I HAVE IN mind a plot for a satirical tale on the subject of literary courage. It goes like this: A young and prominent Asian-born English writer with fashionably left-wing [...]

There is a story about James Joyce and Finnegans Wake, at a glance the most incomprehensible work of fiction ever produced by a major author. When a frustrated admirer protested [...]

The association may seem an odd one, but the figure most immediately called to my mind by the career of the American novelist Henry Roth is T. E. Lawrence, the [...]