Members of the Scribe

I’ve adored illuminated manuscripts all my life — as a child and teenager, these were the postcards I’d take home ...

The period immediately after your book comes out is a wonderful and strange time. On the one hand, the work you’ve done—which ...

Is my fiction Jewish? In my last blog post I came to a firm conclusion: yes—and no. Well, I think I ...

I think most Jewish writers, at one time or another, face the question of what makes them Jewish writers, as opposed ...

Growing up in Orthodox Brooklyn, all that was forbidden to us was, by its nature, exotic. We did not have ...

Perhaps after I was born, someone sneaked into the hospital nursery and instead of snatching me, stood above me and ...

Most of my stories begin with an image or a line that arrives whole and I follow it into the ...

Each of our 50 essays focuses on an individual figure. (The closest there is to an exception is Deborah Lipstadt‘s moving ...

In the movie Airplane, a passenger asks for some “light” reading and is offered “this leaflet, ‘Famous Jewish Sports Legends.'” But ...

In  Operation Shylock , Philip Roth wrote a passage that, had he not written it, we would have needed to ...

Are Israeli guys real men? Yes, I mean the tank commanders and pilots and infantry sergeants. The ones who are ...

Can biographers really know their subjects fully? Was Mark Twain right when he said that “a man’s real life is ...