Benjamin Weiner
By Benjamin Weiner
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Culture You Can Go Home Again
A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful By Gideon Lewis-Kraus Riverhead Books, 344 pages, $26.95 A famous parable tells of a man who travels the world seeking a treasure that he discovers only upon returning home. In “A Sense of Direction,” Gideon Lewis-Kraus fashions a similar trajectory for himself. A memoir…
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News An Honest Marriage of Vermont and Judaism
A white-pillared converted stone church beside a coppice of pine trees and over a sloping meadow from the grave of poet Robert Frost, might seem like a strange location for a sukkah, but this fall the Bennington Museum hosted two of them to mark the centennial of organized Judaism in the Vermont town. Members of…
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Culture Everything in Order
Not all the passions stirred up by Jewish prayer books are directed toward God. The new “Koren Siddur” (Koren Publishers Jerusalem) is a good example. Endorsed by the Orthodox Union and bearing the translations and commentary of Sir Jonathan Sacks, British Chief Rabbi, it has energized Modern Orthodox Jews seeking to assert their worldview, not…
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Culture The Rise and Rise of Haredi Thrillers
‘Elazar had the sensation of having left the secure boundaries of the world he knew,” reads an ominous sentence in the middle of Chaim Eliav’s “The Runaway” “and entered a strange new one — a dangerous world.” Like Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart in a Hitchcock thriller, the protagonist has been accidentally wrenched out of…
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News Sholom Aleichem: The Next Generation
On May 4, a crowd of nearly 200 packed into the community hall of the Brotherhood Synagogue, located on the posh, southern edge of New York’s Gramercy Park. A young-looking man with closely cropped black hair, a matching goatee and black-rimmed glasses stepped to the bima, in front of the holy ark, and welcomed the…
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