David Biale

Sep 26, 2023 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | David Biale

In 1980, I interviewed Gershom Scholem in his hotel in New York for the New York Review of Books, not long after I had published my first book about him. After the formal interview, which focused primarily on the messianism of Gush Emunim and its implications for Israel and Zionism, we discussed other topics in Jewish studies.

Jul 9, 2023 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Benjamin Weiner |David Biale

In the mainstream of Jewish collective memory, Jacob Frank was portrayed as an egomaniac- al and depraved ignoramus, a false messiah, and a cynical serial convert—first to Islam, then Christianity. More recently, however, he has become the subject of radical reappraisal, most notably in Nobel Prize–winner Olga Tokarczuk’s novel The Books of Jacob, which depicts Frank as an eighteenth-century forerunner of a multicultural Poland and modern sexual liberation.