If anything, this felt more like Paris in 2005—a place where there was no shortage of legal protections and official goodwill, but where one wouldn’t be crazy to occasionally hide a yarmulke under a baseball hat. Yet the thought of explaining this was exhausting too, and also beside the point.

Daf Yomi, the “world’s largest book club,”

Another Harbin exile, Alexander Galatzky, was eight during the pogroms of the 1919–1920 Russian Civil War, when he and his mother repeatedly barricaded themselves in their apartment in Ukraine and listened to the screams of their neighbors being murdered and raped.

Harbin’s mayor welcomed participants by citing esteemed Jews such as J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller (neither of whom was Jewish). He then announced that “the world’s money is in the pockets of the Americans, and the Americans’ money is in the pockets of the Jews. This is the highest acclaim and praise to Jewish wisdom.”

you tell that story to your children, you’d be confirming two enormous fears: first, that this country doesn’t really accept you, and second, that the best way to survive and thrive is to dump any outward sign of your Jewish identity and symbolically cut that cord that goes back to Mount Sinai—which, in the case of names like Levy and Cohen, Hebrew

There were a few outliers in this discussion, like the Yale professor Harold Bloom and the British trial lawyer Anthony Julius. But those who thought the play was irredeemably antisemitic were, the consensus went, vulgar and whiny—and, completely coincidentally, they were also Jewish, which somehow magically invalidated their opinions on this

Shooting people in a synagogue in San Diego or Pittsburgh isn’t “systemic”; it’s an act of a “lone wolf.” And it’s not the Holocaust. The same is true for arson attacks against two different Boston-area synagogues, followed by similar simultaneous attacks on Jewish institutions in Chicago a few days later, along with physical assaults on religious

My favorite Hebrew novel of all time, A. B. Yehoshua’s 1989 masterpiece Mr. Mani, is a fantastically inventive story that moves backwards in time through six generations of a Jerusalem family while tracing the family’s recurring suicidal gene—until you get to the end, which is really the beginning, when the enduring mystery of the family’s

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.