Benjamin Balint is a writer and cultural critic based in Jerusalem, known for his work on Israeli culture, Zionism, and literary history. He is the author of several books, including works on the Kafka manuscripts dispute and the Commentary magazine legacy. He contributed essays and reviews to The Weekly Standard between 2004 and 2016, frequently exploring themes of Jewish identity, faith, and the cultural landscape of Israel.
In the opening salvo of her latest collection of essays—her sixth—Cynthia Ozick takes aim at those who express alarm about dwindling audiences for literature in the age of mass media:
Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) was not only Israel’s most beloved contemporary poet and the most widely translated, but also the most profoundly persuaded, with some justice, that his own convulsions and commotions were allied with the country's at large. One of the poems included in this sumptuous…
In one of his more whimsical short stories, the late Israeli satirist Efraim Kishon pits two characters against one another in a game of “Jewish poker,” a game “played without cards, in your head, as befits the People of the Book.” The rules are simple: Whoever thinks of a higher number wins the…
As the theological undercurrents of the present Middle East turmoil roil ever closer to the surface, well-meaning observers in the West have increasingly looked toward a common biblical ancestor to heal conflict among Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Bruce Feiler’s bestselling Abraham: A Journey to…
In “The Eternal City,” the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai observes that his native city has rebuffed most of those who would project onto her their own ambitions, imperial or religious or otherwise. Neither Jerusalem’s conquerors nor its miracle-seeking glorifiers, he wrote, stopped to wonder why /…
Sometimes, a perfectly realized masterwork so far exceeds its mortal creator that it seems something larger and more powerful is speaking through him.
In the encounter between writer and city, there is a certain distance of perspective—neither blurringly close nor loftily Olympian—at which the urban subject comes into sharpest focus. In this well-proportioned narrative history of Jerusalem, Simon Sebag Montefiore pulls in close and trains a…
Hebrew Writers on Writing
Commentary Magazine 1945-1959
Lion's Honey
The Question of Zion
American Judaism