A memoir of Gershom Scholem's friendship with Walter Benjamin reveals that the rivalry inherent in intellectual friendship may produce depths of insight to which later readers should pay attention.

The murder of two Israeli Embassy staffers didn't come out of nowhere. I felt compelled to write this piece for the Times of Israel to explain the roots of the new wave of antisemitism. May the memories of Yaron and Sarah be for a blessing.

Some books you have to wait to read until you're grown, if you want to get what they're really about. That's the case with Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, the basis for the hit movie My Fair Lady, is a funny play with a dark underbelly.

The Red and the Black is both a perfect romance and the finest satire.

There is a great mistake about Saul Bellow. The mistake is to read his books as if he is inscribed, uninflected, in his main characters.

Saul Bellow's Henderson on the "spotty damn mangoes" that make us feel the sorrow of living.

A moral realism most of us today lack subtly girds Camus’s art.

Ludwig Lewisohn on the moral illusionism that bedevils British and American thinkers.