Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav was a religious Jew responsive to the challenge of Jewish secularism; Franz Kafka, a thoroughly secular Jew who loved the paradoxical parables of hasidism. Their stories and their lives reflect deeply on one another. Each died tragically young of tuberculosis. And each, at the very end, asked a close friend to burn his books. In an era of digital books, what do their stories tell us about the deeper meaning of the written word for the people of the book?

Why is Jesus the source of fascination in modern Jewish thought? How has Christianity changed Jewish practice and how did Judaism shape the medieval imagination? We discovered the Jews who insisted on Jesus’ Jewish-ness, the movement to identify Jesus as an Aryan, and how an examination of the Virgin Mary can offer a glimpse into the links and catastrophic breaks between the Abrahamic faiths. Professors Susannah Heschel and Miri Rubin, two leading scholars in the field offered...