Members of the Scribe

Each of our 50 essays focuses on an individual figure. (The closest there is to an exception is Deborah Lipstadt‘s moving ...

In the movie Airplane, a passenger asks for some “light” reading and is offered “this leaflet, ‘Famous Jewish Sports Legends.'” But ...

In  Operation Shylock , Philip Roth wrote a passage that, had he not written it, we would have needed to ...

Are Israeli guys real men? Yes, I mean the tank commanders and pilots and infantry sergeants. The ones who are ...

Can biographers really know their subjects fully? Was Mark Twain right when he said that “a man’s real life is ...

“Are you a professor?” asked the woman sitting next to me on the plane from Israel to New York. She’d ...

For historians, writing biography presents a number of challenges. One of the more important comes from scholars who tend to ...

My Dad and I never watched the Superbowl together. Nor the NBA championships, the World Cup, or the World Series. In ...

Soon after learning my late grandmother’s family lived in Nachlaot, I accepted an invitation for Shabbat dinner from sweet friends, Mottle ...

If there is one consistent theme in the ongoing discoveries of my family history it is meaningful coincidence. Some people ...