Tova Mirvis
How Halloween Taught Me Self-Determination After Leaving Orthodoxy
Halloween reminded me that you don’t have to live with the premise that you had to be entirely inside or else be cast fully outside.
Francine Prose writes in a new book that the most substantive revisions to Anne Frank’s diary were made by Anne herself in the final months of her life.
Northern Commemoration
The Kaddish prayer is not only a thrice-daily means of memorializing a loved one, but also a literary framework that myriad writers have used for telling their stories of loss, from Leon Wieseltier’s dazzlingly vast “Kaddish” to Ari Goldman’s deeply moving and personal “Living a Year of Kaddish.”
Judging a Book By Its Head Covering
Apparently the New York Times Book Review now runs tzitzit checks. Or, in my case, a sheitel check.In her recent essay titled, “The Observant Reader,” Wendy Shalit takes issue with the way Orthodox Judaism is portrayed in various works of fiction. She chastises several fiction writers — myself included — for misrepresenting