Sara Lipton

The Jewish Authenticity Trap

Dara Horn’s fierce, often insightful cri de coeur presents a strangely selective picture of Jewishness, cropping a rich, messy, diverse, and complex history to fit into a tightly focused frame.

Seven Centuries of Slander

Two recent books concerning the blood libel offer hope and a warning. The triumph of myth is not inevitable, but the well of gullibility is easily primed.

Life, Death, and the Levys

A new book traces the twentieth-century scattering of a Sephardic family through five continents.

A Terribly Durable Myth

The exhibition “Jews, Money, Myth” at the Jewish Museum in London

A Nasty Doodle Explained

This nasty doodle, the earliest known anti-Jewish caricature, has much to teach us—about how contingent jokes morph into timeless “truths,” about how people come to hate their neighbors, and about the power and danger of even the apparently trivial image.

Books of Jewish Beauty

A new, gorgeously illustrated volume of Jewish manuscripts challenges the assumption that Jews have contributed little to the visual arts.

Nasty Images of Jews

The Invention of the Jewish Nose

Until 1000 CE, there were no easily distinguishable Jews of any kind in Western imagery, let alone the stereotypical swarthy, hook-nosed Jew.