Episode 75: David Duchovny and John Cleese

The Nouveau Philosophe on ‘The Genius of Judaism,’ the lessons of Jonah, the ‘human excellence’ of cities, and the futility of the fight against global anti-Semitism

When our heroes are all simpering children, is it any wonder our president is, too?

The morally minded French public intellectual applies 21st-century chutzpah to our radical age

The East German-Bulgarian Holocaust movie ‘Sterne,’ screening this weekend at the New York Jewish Film Festival, is one of a group of visceral films made in Communist countries by or with people who survived the war

The influential ‘Voice’ critic died Saturday at age 91. His bohemian fearlessness became a popular culture.

The fearless head of the legendary Grove Press tells, well, not all in his ‘disorienting’ memoir, ‘My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship’

‘The New Yorker’ offers a master class in how not to respond to cheap alt-right provocations

José Kozer, Jewish-Cuban poet of exile and language, still hopes to visualize God

Science and humanism—and Jews and Christians—collide in early modern Europe

This week on Unorthodox, biblical scholar Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg offers a new look at Moses, and linguist and Columbia professor John McWhorter breaks down ‘safe spaces’

New translations of the Hebrew Golden Age poetry of Solomon Ibn Gabirol reveal a man for our time

A long-lost space age satire about what it means to be a Jew from one of science fiction’s greatest humorists

In the mysterious and controversial ancient Hebrew text ‘Toledot Yeshu,’ a counterlife of the Nazarene ‘bastard, son of a menstruant’ that criticizes Jews as much as Christians

A 17th-century ‘holy apostasy’: like Christ’s crucifixion, the fulfillment of a messianic prophecy?

Peering into, and through, the ghostly new Brooklyn

TO: America  FROM: The Jews

Jewish engagement with non-Western faiths is much older than any recent ‘JuBu’ fad

‘The Last Guardian,’ a new video game, is a masterly meditation on learning to care for, and communicate with, others

This week on Unorthodox, Jason Diamond’s memoir about John Hughes, and the divinity school graduates analyzing Harry Potter as though it were a sacred text

Remembering Leonard Cohen

Reconsidering the American Jewish icon as a modern master, not a stereotype

On the 50th anniversary of S.Y. Agnon’s acceptance speech

New editions of the enduring scholarly work of Philipp Jaffé, the Polish Jew who was a groundbreaking German medievalist

An excerpt from Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s new biography of the looming figure of Jewish culture

A superb exhibit of works by the French designer and architect shows the promise and peril of 20th-century Modernism

Live from Toronto’s Beth Tzedec Congregation, Unorthodox talks to novelist David Bezmozgis and opera singer Julie Nesrallah

Jason Diamond’s wry memoir of 1980s Chicago (and 2010s Brooklyn) finds life landmarks in the awkward, lonely malcontents of The Breakfast Club and Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Mystic emanations, and a path forward, in democracy’s wake

How the biblical narrative of Exodus helped shape the founders’ idea of a secular nation with liberty for all