How can Torah be eternal in a world of sovereignty, science, and modern politics? David Curwin contrasts two Religious Zionist readings of Maimonides’ ninth principle—by R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik and R. Chaim Hirschensohn—showing how one warns against concession to modernity, while the other warns against rigidity, and how each frames the challenge of halakhic continuity today.

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.

Mark Gottlieb describes P.H. Brazier’s “A Hebraic Inkling” as, “a comprehensive study devoted to C.S. Lewis’ views on Jews and Judaism.” In responding, Yaakov Weinstein observes that Brazier’s work goes much further by attempting to define Hebraic Christianity, and questions how the famed author and apologist measures up.