Steven Weitzman, The Origin of the Jews: The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age (Princeton UP, 2017) If you want what the title seems to promise, look elsewhere—Weitzman never tells you where the Jews came from. Instead, this is a book about various scholars’ failed quest to discover the origin of the Jews. Misleading title aside, the stories Weitzman tells of how people have tried to figure out the Jews’ beginnings (from genealogy to genetics) are fascinating, their motivatio

My translation of Hebrew writer Abraham Regelson's story "Manual Labor" appears in the Spring 2023 issue of Exchanges.

#whatireadovershabbat Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (trans. John E. Woods) I didn’t read The Magic Mountain in one Shabbat. Yes, the...

#whatireadovershabbat Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince (trans. George Bull) This one was drier than I expected. For all its reputation as...

#whatireadovershabbat Elie Wiesel's Night, translated by Marion Wiesel (1956; Hill and Wang, 2006) Each year that passes puts us at...

#whatireadovershabbat Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, translated by Michael R. Katz (1866; Liveright, 2017) The Russian novel...