Actress Blake Lively recently launched a website called Preserve, which aims to promote an artisanal lifestyle through the posting of recipes, craft projects and style profiles, and to sell a variety of food and clothing items. Because Preserve genuinely desires “to give back to those with fewer opportunities but just as much heart and soul…
Maimonides is trending these days. The 12th century sage, once confined to musty tomes and talmudic study halls, is being brandished in the opinion pages of The New York Times, cited on the airwaves in “This American Life,” and featured in Dara Horn’s latest novel. By some measures, Maimonides is at the height of his…
Maimonides: Life and Thought By Moshe Halbertal Princeton University Press, 400 pages, $35 About 800 years before the Pew study, Moses Maimonides received a worried letter from the leader of the Jewish community of Yemen asking him how to combat the specter of assimilation. Yemenite Jews had recently been afflicted by persecution and by a…
● Norman Mailer, A Double Life By J. Michael Lennon Simon & Schuster, 960 pages, $40 While reading the first chapter of “Norman Mailer, A Double Life,” the exhaustive (and exhausting) new biography of the great man by J. Michael Lennon, I discovered that during his formative years, from the age of nine through his…
Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby took to Twitter to thank all those helping in the search for his missing teenage son — and plead for more help in the case. The dad’s poignant plea came as police continued to hunt for Caleb Jacoby, an 11th grader at Maimonides School in the Boston suburb of Brookline,…
This may seem odd, but a surprisingly large chunk of the Western World believed we wouldn’t get to see 2013, purely because that’s what the Mayans thought. Most of these people never did anything else that Mayans did — never ate human flesh, for example, or at least never offered to pay for it. So…
● Charity: The Place of the Poor in the Biblical Tradition by Gary A. Anderson Yale University Press, 232 pages, $30 Charity, as an old joke puts it, sometimes does begin at home, but it always begins with an annoying phone call. But Jews, with their high rates of charitable giving, have often been eager…
● A Guide for the Perplexed By Dara Horn W. W. Norton & Company, 352 pages, $25.95 In Dara Horn’s first novel, “In the Image,” published in 2002, Rosenthal, an elderly Jewish immigrant, tells young Jason about crossing the Atlantic in steerage. When the ship finally approached the Statue of Liberty, passengers were so eager…
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