Arts & Culture
In his new book, Ross Douthat writes convincingly of America’s descent into decadence and torpor. Can anything stop the slide?
Contemporary yoga culture fits in with the widespread sense of religiosity as something inner and instinctual rather than communal and tradition-bound.
Houdini’s was the prototypically self-made American tale. But even while turning himself into the world’s greatest breaker of constraints, he remained a proudly identified Jew.
Why some Orthodox Jews are nervous about yoga, and why they’re right to be.
An Italian Yiddish was never in the cards, as the case of “Judeo-Mantuan” makes clear, because Jews were more closely integrated into Italian society than they were in Eastern Europe.
And most of them reveal a hidden admiration for the person who’s had the wit and the grit to get away with it.
The memoirs of this 17th-century Jewish woman have long fascinated historians. For the first time, a complete English edition brings her to life for today’s readers.
The figure of the great fairy king in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is descended from Judah Maccabee.
Six more Mosaic writers share their favorites, featuring shadow strikes, orchards, gleanings, constitutional evolutions and revolutions, serotonin, odd women, and more.
Seven of our regular writers pick several favorites each, featuring sieges, spies, cultural revolutions, family papers, useful enemies, new fields of inquiry, and more.
Let us sing of rodomont, Sinon, proditomania, and, in particular, grobian.
Mieczysław Weinberg wrote music equal in its genius to Mahler and Shostakovich, including one of the most powerful tributes to the victims of 20th-century tyranny.
Lauded in Israel but unknown outside, Zelda’s poetry provides an alternative to the desacralized cosmos in which most of us live.
In a season of mass protests in Hong Kong and a fierce dustup with the NBA, the acclaimed new Chinese-American film is (almost) silent on the costs of engaging with authoritarianism.
