People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

makes Jewish literature into a kind of anti-literature—one that should make everyone question what they want out of a work of literary art.

The freedoms that we cherish are meaningless without our commitments to one another:

What one finds in Jewish storytelling, though, is something really different: a kind of realism that comes from humility, from the knowledge that one cannot be true to the human experience while pretending to make sense of the world. These are stories without conclusions, but full of endurance and resilience. They are about human limitations, which

The beginning of freedom is the beginning of responsibility.

American antisemitism during the decades that followed the mass migration was, as Fermaglich puts it, “private” and therefore “insidious.” In the earlier part of the twentieth century, such discrimination was not subtle, appearing in job advertisements with the warning “Christians Only” or at hotels and restaurants posting signs declaring “No Dogs

All the Seas Were Ink, describing how the daily routine of Talmud study carried her through challenging years in her own life—and her book inspired many less-traditional people who had previously assumed that Talmud study wasn’t for them.

When we finish, we will be seven years older in our respective generations, and also, God willing, seven years wiser—even if we forget what we have learned, even if we are broken, even if our forgotten wisdom rattles around inside our minds like shards of broken tablets.

The Soviet Union’s destruction of Jewish culture commenced, in a calculated move, with Jews positioned as the destroyers. It began with the Yevsektsiya, committees

So many of our expectations of literature are based on Christianity—and not just Christianity, but the precise points at which Christianity and Judaism diverge. And then I noticed something else: the canonical works by authors in Jewish languages almost never give their readers any of those things.