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Sulaiman Khatib and
Avner Wishnitzer
Combatants for Peace

We are a group of former Israeli soldiers and formerly imprisoned Palestinians. Our work is a model for the nonviolent way forward.

Edward Chancellor
The Naturalist

In a new biography, Friedrich Hayek emerges as a paradoxical figure: a passionate liberal whose most enthusiastic supporters have been conservative.

Caleb Crain
Fatal Embracements

In Tom Crewe’s debut novel The New Life, based on the first tolerant Victorian case studies of homosexuality, sex becomes a touchstone that helps bridge time.

Magda Teter
Found in Translation

A painstaking work of linguistic and textual archaeology unravels a forgotten story of pre-Ashkenazi Jews’ presence in medieval eastern Europe and their intellectual contributions.

Perry Link
A Fallen Artist in Mao’s China

Ha Jin’s The Woman Back from Moscow, a fictionalized account of the life of the actress Sun Weishi, depicts the hypocrisy of the Communist elites and the fate of those who embraced new ideals after the revolution.

An Open Letter on the Misuse of Holocaust Memory

Appealing to the memory of the Holocaust obscures our understanding of the antisemitism Jews face today and dangerously misrepresents the causes of violence in Israel-Palestine.

Free from the Archives

In the Review’s February 25, 2021, issue, Christopher Benfey wrote about Thomas Morton, a “real-life Sir Toby Belch” who lived in the Puritan separatist colony of Merrymount, Massachusetts, and “seems to have taken particular delight in driving first the Pilgrims, then the Puritans, out of their minds.” Where the Pilgrims thanked God for the plague that killed entire Native American communities, and later slaughtered “1,500 Natives in two months, including women and children,” Morton “was particularly impressed with the seemingly laid-back Indians, who ‘leade the more happy and freer life, being voyde of care, which torments the minds of so many Christians.’” More to the point, “Morton was openly trading guns to the Indians for furs.” The Pilgrims soon had him arrested (he “was too drunk to offer resistance”) and dumped him in New Hampshire. Morton returned to England, but would have his revenge, publishing a book in which he concluded: “I have found the Massachussets Indian more full of humanity then the Christians.”

Christopher Benfey
Pranksters and Puritans

“It would be difficult to imagine someone more abhorrent to the godly colonists than Thomas Morton, an adventurer, a libertine, a lover of the natural world, and a passionate admirer (and lover) of Native Americans.”

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