Editor's Pick ·
How One of Russia’s Leading Literary Figures Became One of Zionism’s Greatest Leaders
The making of Vladimir Jabotinksy.
Hillel Halkin
Hillel Halkin’s books include Yehuda Halevi, Across the Sabbath River, Melisande: What are Dreams? (a novel), Jabotinsky: A Life (2014), and, most recently, After One-Hundred-and-Twenty (Princeton).
Latest Content
Observation ·
The Value of Greek Wisdom in the Land of Israel
By Hillel HalkinCommitted to developing and supporting the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
Response ·
Did Jabotinsky Really Mean it or Was He Pandering?
By Hillel HalkinAs the “prominent exception” cited by Avi Shilon to the view that Jabotinsky was a “staunch secularist” all his life, I find myself in agreement with nearly everything in his essay. My one caveat is...
Observation ·
Loss, Discovery, and a Lost Discovery in “Reading Ruth”
By Hillel Halkin, Meir SoloveichikCommitted to developing and supporting the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
Editor's Pick ·
The Unknown Jewish Sides of an American Generation
Steve Kogan’s Winter Vigil.
Observation ·
Podcast: Hillel Halkin and Ruth Wisse on His Life in Hebrew
By Tikvah Podcast at Mosaic, Hillel Halkin, Ruth R. WisseCommitted to developing and supporting the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
Response ·
In the Hebrew Bible, Humans Never Learn. But Neither Does God.
By Hillel HalkinBefore Leon Kass in the “ People-Forming Passover ,” there was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781). It was Lessing who proposed, in his 1780 The Education of the Human Race, that the best way to co...
Observation ·
A Tribute to Mosaic’s Founding Editor
By Eric Cohen, Ruth R. Wisse, Martin Kramer, Hillel Halkin, Meir SoloveichikCommitted to developing and supporting the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
Response ·
Jews Wanting to Draw Others Closer to Judaism Should Ask Themselves Why
By Hillel HalkinIn his Mosaic essay “ The Restoration of the Jewish People ,” Ofir Haivry has concisely summarized the range of wholly Jewish, partly Jewish, marginally Jewish, and newly Jewish existence in our con...
Response ·
Bellow Between Hebraism and Hellenism
By Hillel HalkinOnce, if asked to respond to Ruth Wisse’s fine and penetrating essay on Saul Bellow’s Jewishness, I would have made a point of re-reading each of the novels discussed by her. Having become stingier...
Editor's Pick ·
In Her New Book on Anti-Semitism, Bari Weiss Bravely States the Obvious
Even as she insists on clinging to a bankrupt progressivism and “the Judaism of Sunday school.”
Observation ·
The Mind-Boggling Story of Shlomo and Yemimah Gangte
By Hillel HalkinCommitted to developing and supporting the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
Response ·
The Necessary Bad Faith in Reading the Bible as Literature
By Hillel HalkinI thank Jon Levenson and Leonard Greenspoon for their kind responses to my essay on Robert Alter’s translation of the Hebrew Bible. I’ll address their pieces in the reverse order of their appearance...
Monthly Essay ·
How to Judge Robert Alter’s Landmark Translation of the Hebrew Bible
By Hillel HalkinFinished after decades of labor, this one-man English translation is a stupendous achievement. How does it hold up against the masterpieces (and follies) that have come before?
Response ·
The Agnon Wink
By Hillel HalkinMy thanks to Jeffrey Saks and Dara Horn for their gracious responses to my essay on S.Y. Agnon and his 1945 Hebrew masterpiece Only Yesterday . I’ll reply to their comments in the reverse order of...
Monthly Essay ·
The Matchless Master of Modern Hebrew Literature
By Hillel HalkinIn his fiction, and especially in the novel Only Yesterday , S.Y. Agnon casts an ironic, unfooled eye on the inner lives of his fellow Jews and their lopsided bargains with modernity.
Response ·
Jewish Historians Could Stand to Borrow a Trick from the Greeks
By Hillel HalkinI don’t see how one can say, as Eric Mechoulan does in “ What is the Meaning of Jewish History? ,” that “the very idea of history was a Jewish invention.” What Jews invented was the idea that history...
Response ·
A Glorious Hebrew Poet—and Her Challenging Rhymes
By Hillel HalkinI thank both Sarah Rindner and Michael Weingrad for their kind comments on “ The Life, Work, and Legacy of Israel’s Most Beloved Poet .” I am also grateful to Sarah Rindner for giving me a chance to...
Monthly Essay ·
The Life, Work, and Legacy of Israel’s Most Beloved Poet
By Hillel HalkinRaḥel will be read, sung, and recited long after many excellent Hebrew poets of her age, men and women alike, have been confined within classroom walls.
Observation ·
The Self-Actualizing Zionism of A.D. Gordon
By Hillel HalkinCommitted to developing and supporting the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
Observation ·
The Auto-Anti-Semitism of Yosef Hayyim Brenner
By Hillel HalkinCommitted to developing and supporting the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
Editor's Pick ·
Yehuda Amichai: Master of Metaphor and the Quintessence of Israeli Jewishness
A complex network of pipes.
Observation ·
The Complex Greatness of the Jewish National Poet, Part Three
By Hillel HalkinCommitted to developing and supporting the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
Observation ·
The Complex Greatness of the Jewish National Poet, Part Two
By Hillel HalkinCommitted to developing and supporting the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
Observation ·
The Complex Greatness of the Jewish National Poet, Part One
By Hillel HalkinCommitted to developing and supporting the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
Response ·
The Vanishing of the Jewish Collective
By Hillel HalkinI fully agree with Daniel Gordis (and with Elliott Abrams in his earlier essay in Mosaic ) that it is putting the cart before the horse to ascribe American Jewry’s growing distance from Israel to...
Observation ·
The Most Tragic Jewish Writer of Modern Times
By Hillel HalkinCommitted to developing and supporting the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
Response ·
Why Ahad Ha’am Still Matters
By Hillel HalkinIn his response to my essay, Allan Arkush is probably right in saying that Ahad Ha’am, were he to visit present-day Israel, would grumble about what he saw and heard. The country’s rough-edged popul...
Monthly Essay ·
What Ahad Ha’am Saw and Herzl Missed—and Vice Versa
By Hillel HalkinThe unresolved rivalry between the great Zionist thinker and the great Zionist strategist still shapes the contending outlooks of many 21st-century Jews.
Response ·
Like No Other People, Jews Remain Rooted in Their Past
By Hillel HalkinI thank Alan Mintz, Lewis Glinert, and Dara Horn for their appreciative remarks on my essay, “ Where Is the Jews’ Homeland? ” I am especially pleased by the attention they have paid to the matter of t...
