01 Nov
Latest

The Long Life of Fiddler on the Roof

Alisa Solomon is the author most recently of the new book Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof. She also has written Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theatre and Gender and edited several books including Wrestling with Zion and The Queerest Art. She teaches at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and lives in New York City. Q: Why did you decide to write Wonder of Wonders? A: First, because the Tevye stories, and their incarnation as Fiddler on the Roof, had such a huge impact and seeped into the culture so deeply that they can really tell us a lot about how culture works in society and how collective memory is created, and a lot about the Jewish experience in the United States and beyond, and some of the universal themes that the stories . Why personally was I drawn to it? It...

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10 Sep
Latest

Book Q&A: Writing on Philip Roth

Claudia Roth Pierpont is the author of the forthcoming Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, a study of the novelist Philip Roth, who is no relation. A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, she also is the author of Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World, a collection of essays. She lives in New York City. Q: Why did you decide to write about Philip Roth? A: The simple answer is that I think he’s a great writer, one of the greatest novelists of the century. I was working on a collection of pieces about American figures that was published in The New Yorker. I wanted it to end with him. I met him, and he was accommodating and easy to talk to; I thought, This is the chance of a lifetime! It seemed like an opportunity I’d be mad to pass up....

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09 Sep
Latest

Book Q&A: John Rosengren on Hank Greenberg

John Rosengren is the author most recently of a biography, Hank Greenberg: The Hero of Heroes. His other books include Hammerin' Hank, George Almighty and the Say Hey Kid: The Year that Changed Baseball Forever, Alone in the Trenches: My Life as a Gay Player in the NFL (written with Esera Tuaolo), and Bladesof Glory: The True Story of a Young Team Bred to Win. He lives in Minneapolis. Q: Why did you decide to write a biography of Hank Greenberg? A: Because he was one of the most significant figures in American history. As a Hall of Fame baseball player, he had this stage—the game in the 1930s and ‘40s was the national pastime—at a time when there was strong ethnic identity, much stronger than today. In the first two decades of the 20th century, people grew up in neighborhoods surrounded by people from their ...

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28 May
Book Review, Culture, Interview, Latest, Religion

Book Q&A: Naomi Schaefer Riley

Naomi Schaefer Riley, a former Wall Street Journal editor and writer, is the author most recently of 'Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage Is Transforming America. She also is the author of God on the Quad and The Faculty Lounges, and the co-editor of Acculturated. She lives in the New York suburbs. Q: What inspired you to write 'Til Faith Do Us Part? A: I’ve been a religion reporter for 15 years now. I was very familiar, from growing up , with Jewish questions about intermarriage, but I was surprised in doing my research that other religious communities were facing—not as head-on—the same questions about intermarriage. Not necessarily demographic questions, but finding that interfaith marriages were more common. Religious leaders are facing questions about how to counsel and perform . Q: How did you...

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23 May
Book Review, History, Latest

Herod the Great?

Norman Gelb is the author of many works of history, including The Berlin Wall, Less Than Glory, Desperate Venture, and Kings of the Jews. His most recent book is Herod the Great: Statesman, Visionary, Tyrant. Born in New York, Gelb has spent many years in Europe, as a correspondent for the Mutual Broadcasting System in Berlin and London, and as U.K. correspondent for The New Leader magazine. He lives in London. Q: Why did you decide to write a biography of Herod the Great? A: Herod was the subject of one of the chapters in my previous book, on the lives and times of the kings and reigning queens of ancient Israel. While researching that chapter, I came to appreciate how inaccurate was the prevailing popular image of this Jewish Arab ruler of the ancient kingdom of...

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03 May
Book Review, History, Interview, Latest

Glenn Frankel on “The Searchers”

Glenn Frankel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent many years as a Washington Post reporter and editor, now serves as director of the School of Journalism and G.B. Dealey Regents Professor in Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. His new book is titled The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend. It focuses on the making of the movie The Searchers, starring John Wayne, and the real-life story of Cynthia Ann Parker, on which The Searchers was partly based. He also is the author of Beyond the Promised Land: Jews and Arabs on the Hard Road to a New Israel, and Rivonia's Children: Three Families and the Cost of Conscience in White South Africa. Q: What first intrigued you about The Searchers, and why did you decide it would make a good subject for a...

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