JEWDAR
BOOKS, MOVIES, AND OTHER NEW RELEASES OF NOTE
The Consolations of History, Humour, and Hummus
BOOKS / NON-FICTION Theory of Everything
WE ARE ALL Kaplanians now. That is to say, if the great question of post- war Jewish thought was, Will the future of Jewish life be built on the fervour of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s radical amazement, or the rational- ism of Mordecai Kaplan’s civilizational Judaism? I think we’d largely have to
IN HER NEW BOOK, award-winning writer and artist Molly Crabapple invites readers into a radical political imagination at a moment when questions of national- ism, belonging, and solidarity feel especially urgent. The Jewish Labor Bund, once a significant force in Jew- BOOKS / NON-FICTION Radical Remembrance
say Kaplan had the right of it. Born in a small town outside of Vilna, in modern-day Lithuania, in 1881 and dying in New York in 1983, Kaplan had a Zelig-like ability to pop up at virtually every major juncture where Jews were navigating modern iden- tity. An anti-originalist, to him, Judaism was not a religion dat- ing back to Sinai but an ever-changing, ever-evolving culture and civilization — one that invites, and requires, constant mending and amending to adapt to the modern world of science and lib-
ish political life in Eastern Europe, rooted itself in internationalism, secularism, and collective strug- gle. Writing of its history and lead- ers, Crabapple blends personal and political to recover the emotional, religious, and revolutionary worlds of Bundist life. By reclaiming this often-forgotten tradition of Jew-
HERE WHERE WE LIVE IS OUR COUNTRY: THE STORY OF THE JEWISH BUND Molly Crabapple One World April 7
eralism. This new biography of Kaplan draws extensively from the daily diaries Kaplan kept almost continuously from 1904 until his death. It is a timely arrival, as Jews once again navigate the challenges of maintaining traditional identities and ideological com- mitments as the world those identities once reflected disappears. Zachary Kauffman
MORDECAI M. KAPLAN: RESTLESS SOUL Jenna Weissman Joselit Yale University Press March 17
ish radicalism, the book hopes to open up a space for reconsidering how communities are forged, how hope endures amid catastrophe, and what lessons a destroyed movement might still offer for navigating division, exile, and resistance today. Sophia Hershfield
60 SPRING 2026
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