It is too easy to dismiss or ignore popular culture, especially that addressed to children. A new collection of personal and critical essays, “Artifacts of Orthodox Jewish Childhoods” (Ben Yehuda Press), helps combat that dismissal, and might even inspire us to think seriously about the cultures of our own childhoods. Uri C. Cohen reviews the volume and applauds its blurring of boundaries between the scholarly and the personal, suggesting it proves to be a positive development when scholars are open about their subjectivity.

Jews have had a long and storied relationship with the practice of medicine throughout history, of which little physical evidence remains. The medical diploma is one of few tangible representations of this history. As the diploma often contained Christian references, Jewish students would sometimes be permitted to make alterations to remove them. Yet adding any specifically Jewish reference to a medical diploma was simply unheard of—until now. Edward Reichman presents an overlooked 1647 medical diploma of a Florentine Jew and explores a creative example of Jewish physicians applying the lens of Torah to their medical training and practice.