We celebrate a half-century since the opening of Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway, looking at the life of the musical on stage and screen and Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish stories that inspired it. What is it about Fiddler’s winning combination of family, tradition and song that has had such a hold on the Jewish cultural imagination ever since? Jeremy Dauber’s The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Teyve is the first comprehensive biogr...

In this unique narrative of the Hebrew language from biblical to modern times, Professor Lewis Glinert explores the extraordinary hold that Hebrew has had on Jews and Christians, who have invested it with a symbolic power far beyond that of any other language in history. Preserved by the Jews for millennia, Hebrew was a bridge to Greek and Arab science; Kabbalists and humanists sought philosophical truth in it; and Colonial Americans used it to shape their own Israelite political identity. In...

Jeremy Dauber delivers a breath-taking and enthralling illustrated history of Jewish humour ‘in all its vast and variegated forms from antiquity to yesterday’, from the Book of Esther to Seinfeld, by way of Mel Brooks and Philip Roth, offering an erudite yet entertaining history of Jewish comedy, not evading the question: what is Jewish humour and what makes a joke a Jewish joke?

From a Catskllls comic to one of the few individuals to have won Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards, Mel Brooks dominated 20th century American comedy. Now, as he approaches 97, the director of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein is the subject of the latest book in Yale’s Jewish Lives series. Jeremy Dauber’s Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew explores how Brooks’ American Jewish humour morphed from being solely for niche audiences ...