When Nobel Prize-winner Isaac Bashevis Singer died in 1991 aged 87, he was already a canonical American writer. Yet Singer never wrote in English, although he did edit his stories in their English translations. His fame is as a Yiddish writer who kept the language, and the lost world it sprang from, alive in the world of the imagination. For writer Adam Thirlwell, Singer’s fascination is as a master storyteller with a strikingly modernist approach. Extreme, ironic and unsentiment...

The history of Jewish novelists has been a history of emigration: of exile and translation. From Kafka to Italo Svevo, from Isaac Bashevis Singer to Saul Bellow, Jewish novelists have often been marked by a cultural and linguistic cosmopolitanism. But what is the value of displacement? of memory? The director of Complicite who adapted Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles to the stage discussed these themes with Adam Thirlwell.

On half-Jews, non-jewish-Jews, self-hating Jews, anti-semitic Jews, et al…

Two of the most formidably minded polemicists on the literary scene discussed the many possible manifestations of Judaism and whether any of these semitic permutations actually matters.

Having inherited a cache of thousands of letters between his grandparents, Ian Buruma, author of Year Zero, has interwoven his voice with theirs to bring to life a remarkable sixty-year marriage that survived many shocks and the span of two world wars.  In Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love and War, Buruma pays homage to achievements that included helping twelve Jewish children to escape Nazi Germany and find new lives in Britain. His spellbin...