Gary Shtyengart’s new book, “Lake Success,” his first novel in seven years, follows Barry Cohen, a hedge-fund trader under investigation from the SEC, as he bails on his marriage and his autistic toddler son in favor of a Greyhound bus ride in search of the “real America.” It’s a midlife crisis road-trip novel set in…
This story was co-published with ProPublica, the investigative journalism organization. In 2016, as Palestinian-American poet Remi Kanazi performed at college campuses around the United States, his appearances seemed to spark student protests. Before his visit to John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, a page called “John Jay Students Against Hate” appeared…
A group of Russian immigrant families who all lost a loved one on 9/11 have become a tightly-knit support network since the attacks
On September 19, 2001, an obscure Chicago politician was afforded three hundred words in the Hyde Park Herald to react to the September 11 attacks. “Even as I hope for some measure of peace and comfort to the bereaved families,” he wrote, “I must also hope that we as a nation draw some measure of…
Michele Bachmann, a former Republican congresswoman who drew criticism in 2015 for calling for the mass conversion of the Jews, had an announcement to make to the Jewish people. An Israeli organization seeking to strengthen the bond between evangelical Christians and the State of Israel orchestrated it at the Knesset on the eve of Israel’s…
A medieval Jewish manuscript bearing the oldest known example of the Yiddish language is making a rare public appearance at Israel’s National Library in Jerusalem ahead of the High Holidays. The Worms Mahzor, named for the German city where it was housed for centuries, is a richly illuminated codex from the 13th century containing the…
In exciting news for readers of global Jewish literature, the National Endowment of the Arts announced translation grants for a Yiddish translator, a Hebrew translator, a Finnish translator translating a Finnish Jewish comic novelist, and a translator of a Swiss-Jewish writer. The highly coveted grants are among the most prestigious available to translators and are…
Being little more than a husk of keratin hacked off the head of a ram, the shofar is not a very versatile instrument. Because there’s no real mechanism to alter pitch within the hollow horn, the burden is on the blower, who can modulate tones using his or her lips, teeth or tip-of-the tongue. For…
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