HeyJaredJewish Review of Books
The Jewish Review of Books is a quarterly print publication with an active online presence for serious readers with Jewish interests.
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- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 17
- Latest publication
- Oct 1, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 22, 2026
Latest issues
When It Rains (opens the original)
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A hard rain fell on New York this past week, cancelling the last Yankees game of the regular season and complicating Sukkot plans across the tri-state area. I happen to live in an apartment with an uncovered balcony, so building a sukkah is technically feasible. However, given the sometimes heavy winds this high up, my wife and I prefer not to risk making our hut into a hang glider. We decamped to family for the holiday.Unfortunately, we only managed to have the first of four Sukkot meals in the
Giving and Taking (opens the original)
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By Michael WalzerFor about four years in the middle and late 1970s, I was a Jewish fundraiser, and, later, for some twenty years, I raised money for Dissent Magazine. I was never very good at it, but I did get to be good at talking about it.I started early, standing at eight or nine years old on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx with my tzedaka box. But it was a few years later in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, that I learned what Jewish fundraising was really like. After my bar mitzvah in 1948, my par
The Chazon Ish’s Beautiful Chinese Fruit, Atonement at Berkeley (opens the original)
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On the way to the JRB office, I picked up my lulav and etrog for the holiday. This year, what appealed to me was a large, lumpy “Chazon Ish Esrog” and a yardstick-long lulav. The Chazon Ish, Rabbi Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz, is famous for many things—his talmudic genius, his “pact” with Ben Gurion, his maximalist approach to halachic measurements—and one of them was being very careful to make sure that his etrog wasn’t from a tree that was a descendant of one that had been grafted with, say, an or
The Fall Issue is Out! (opens the original)
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Our new fall issue is in the hands of the US Postal Service (and God, who, along with our new first-class postage policy, may help) and posted on the website. It’s our largest issue yet, with great reviews and essays from some of our favorite writers, as always thinking deeply but wearing their learning lightly, from a lead review by Matti Friedman to a closing personal essay by Michael Walzer. If you’re not a subscriber (or have a friend who isn’t), this is the deal for a sweet, learned, and wi
Vendyl Jones and the Temple of Incense (opens the original)
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By Yosef LindellIn the last issue of JRB, I wrote about a treasure-hunting biblical archeologist. Not Indiana Jones, but Vendyl Jones, a Noahide who dedicated himself to searching for (or raiding?) Temple treasures and claimed to have found the lost Temple incense—the ketoret—in 1992. It turns out that after my article was published, two new works about Vendyl Jones and his discoveries were released. The first was a documentary called <span
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