An unexpected call from Riverton, Manitoba, in 2007 forced Janet Berg to confront her father Daniel's life and death. A farmer found him dead in a field with a shotgun, and the forty-year-old scientist needed to explain why. From her home in Seattle, half a continent away, she sifted through musty boxes and her memories to piece together what happened to Daniel during his last twelve years of estrangement. Poring over scribbled notes, emails, police reports, and her father's well-worn Bibl...

An unexpected call from Riverton, Manitoba in 2007 forced Janet Berg to confront the life and death of her father. A farmer found Daniel in his field with a shotgun and the forty-year-old scientist needed to explain why. From her home in Seattle, half a continent away, she sifted through musty boxes and her own memories to piece together what happened to Daniel over his last twelve years of estrangement. Poring over scribbled notes and emails, police reports, and her father’s well-worn Bib...

An unexpected call from Riverton, Manitoba, in 2007 forced Janet Berg to confront her father Daniel's life and death. A farmer found him dead in a field with a shotgun, and the forty-year-old scientist needed to explain why. From her home in Seattle, half a continent away, she sifted through musty boxes and her memories to piece together what happened to Daniel during his last twelve years of estrangement. Poring over scribbled notes, emails, police reports, and her father's well-worn Bibl...

An unexpected call from Riverton, Manitoba, in 2007 forced Janet Berg to confront her father Daniel's life and death. A farmer found him dead in a field with a shotgun, and the forty-year-old scientist needed to explain why. From her home in Seattle, half a continent away, she sifted through musty boxes and her memories to piece together what happened to Daniel during his last twelve years of estrangement. Poring over scribbled notes, emails, police reports, and her father's well-worn Bibl...

A prominent public intellectual tackles one of the most crucial political ideas of our moment.Since Hamas’s attack on Israel last October 7, the term “settler colonialism” has become central to public debate in the United States. A concept new to most Americans, but already established and influential in academic circles, settler colonialism is shaping the way many people think about the history of the United States, Israel and Palestine, and a host of political is...

Should we welcome the end of humanity?In this blistering book about the history of an idea, one of our leading critics draws on his dazzling range and calls our attention to a seemingly inconceivable topic that is being seriously discussed: that the end of humanity’s reign on earth is imminent, and that we should welcome it. Kirsch journeys through literature, philosophy, science, and popular culture, to identify two strands of thinking: Anthropocene antihumanism s...

An erudite and accessible survey of Jewish life and culture in the twentieth century, as reflected in seminal texts.Following The People and the Books, which "covers more than 2,500 years of highly variegated Jewish cultural expression" (Robert Alter, New York Times Book Review), poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch now turns to the story of modern Jewish literature. From the vast emigration of Jews out of Eastern Europe to the Holocaust to the cr...

An accessible introduction to the classics of Jewish literature, from the Bible to modern times, by "one of America’s finest literary critics" (Wall Street Journal).Jews have long embraced their identity as “the people of the book.” But outside of the Bible, much of the Jewish literary tradition remains little known to nonspecialist readers. The People and the Books shows how central questions and themes of our history and culture are reflected in...

A literary critic’s journey through the Talmud.Spurred by a curiosity about Daf Yomi—a study program launched in the 1920s in which Jews around the world read one page of the Talmud every day for 2,711 days, or about seven and a half years—Adam Kirsch approached Tablet magazine to write a weekly column about his own Daf Yomi experience. An avowedly secular Jew, Kirsch did not have a religious source for his interest in the Talmud; rather, as a student of J...

In the aftermath of October 7, Zionism has increasingly been used by critics of Israel as a term of derision. From university campuses to TikTok and Twitter/X, the term is employed as a self-evident slur that presumes that Zionists are racist and supremacist.Yet, as Adam Kirsch writes in this groundbreaking essay, the challenge for Jews today is not merely to counter attempts to distort and corrupt the meaning and origins of Zionism. The Jewish people, he argues, do not need to def...

From one of today's keenest critics comes a collection of essays on poetry, religion, and the connection between the twoAdam Kirsch is one of today's finest literary critics. This collection brings together his essays on poetry, religion, and the intersections between them, with a particular focus on Jewish literature. He explores the definition of Jewish literature, the relationship between poetry and politics, and the future of literary reputation in the age of the internet. Sever...

Part of the Jewish Encounter seriesA dandy, a best-selling novelist, and a man of political and sexual intrigue, Benjamin Disraeli was one of the most captivating figures of the nineteenth century. His flirtation with proto-Zionism, his ideas about power and empire, and his fantasies about the Middle East remain prophetically relevant today. How a man who was born a Jew--and who remained in the eyes of his countrymen a member of a despised minority--managed to beco...