Jewish Literature

The Jewish Hall of Fame

I once heard Sarah Silverman tell a joke about the pride Jews inevitably take in the accomplishments of other Jews. To paraphrase, ...

Obscene Recommendations

Some of the literary works I deal with in Unclean Lips are relatively well-known—Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1935) and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), for ...

Sports Is Like Hollywood: They’re Both Jewish!

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

Jews and Anxiety

This past May I published an essay in The New York Times titled “Do the Jews Own Anxiety?” Not long afterward, ...

Maurice Sendak

From monsters under the bed to the horrors of the Holocaust, the artist and author knows his way around a child's brain.

Isaac Babel

Gangsters, beggars, prostitutes and other inhabitants of Jewish Odessa.

Lilith Magazine

Giving Jewish women a voice.

Women in Holocaust Literature: Writers and Writings

These women use diaries, memoirs, fiction, and poetry to express their Holocaust experience.

Self-Hating Jews

Defining Jewish self-hatred is, like most matters in Jewish life, subject to debate.

Chaim Potok

His Judaism, and his dissatisfaction with it, formed the cornerstone of his stories.

Bee Season

A novel by Myla Goldberg.

Portnoy’s Complaint

A novel by Philip Roth.