Ilana Kurshan reviews “A Woman is Responsible for Everything” by Debra Kaplan and Elisheva Carlebach (Princeton University Press)—a groundbreaking study of Jewish women in early modern Europe drawing on rich archival records and material culture. It reveals women as communal leaders, cultural producers, and religious actors long hidden in plain sight, and shows how literacy, print, and daily practice reshaped Jewish life from the inside out.

As the rules-based world order erodes, Chaim Strauchler argues that antisemitism is not a malfunction but a feature of unrestrained power. Reassessing R. Moshe Feinstein’s vision of America as a “nation of hesed,” he contends that Judaism has always prepared for moral loneliness—surviving not through kindness of strangers, but through internal discipline, law, and covenantal courage.