robert alter

When I saw that the new issue of The New Republic had Robert Alter reviewing a new work by Nathan Englander, I instinctively thought it’d be of Englander’s new translation of the Passover Haggadah.  Given that Alter is a widely admired translator of the Hebrew Bible, it was only natural for me to assume as much. 

It can’t be said that no one pays any attention to scholarly books about the Bible.  After all, works by Robert Alter and Harold Bloom are often best-sellers.