“The great issues don’t need to be vulgarized,” observes the narrator of David Slavitt’s 15th work of fiction. “They are vulgar, for they are exactly those things that everybody worries about.” Of those great issues, perhaps the most inscrutable is the one most poignantly summarized in the title of Rabbi Harold Kushner’s 1982 bestseller, When...

David Novak, Professor of Modern Jewish Thought at the University of Virginia, sets out to argue the case for what is called Jewish-Christian “dialogue.” Unfortunately, the author never gives us anything but the most offhand idea of what he means by the term, but we can assume he means the activity carried out largely by...