“I’ve got a situation here,” said Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn as he stood at the edge of the freshwater pool. “I can do the men’s mikve

Five celebrated American-born, secular Jewish artists—Jack Levine, George Segal, Audrey Flack, Larry Rivers and R.B. Kitaj—found inspiration in the Bible, creating modern midrash. In the

Call it the Big Apple. Gotham. Or even, just New York, New York. Anyone who picks up any of the three volumes that make up

Although the family depicted in David Laskin’s impressively researched and absorbing narrative is his, it is compelling as both memoir and history. It recounts the

The Collini Case: A Novel (Viking Adult, 208 pp. $25.95 cloth, $15 paper) combines murder, love, greed, ambition, politics and Nazis. Written by Ferdinand von Schirach, a

In The Retrospective (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 336 pp. $26), adeptly translated by Stuart Schoffman, Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua shows himself to have serious metaphysical and theological

The root sin, khaf, lamed takes us to wisdom, success, cunning, eyesight and mystical power.

In her second book, In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist (New York Review Books, 207 pp. $16 paper), set in Jerusalem in 1999, Ruchama King Feuerman depicts