The title of her new book is Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. It retells the history of American racism from slavery to segregation, from everyday indignities to the use of lethal force. Throughout, she strives to write not of whites and Blacks, but of the majority caste and the minority caste.
The demolition of a statue, the withdrawal of public adulation for the erstwhile hero the statue commemorates, has echoes of a fundamental Jewish principle: the injunction against graven images.
The first time I read a book by Philip Roth, I read it from back to front.
In his foreword to Linda Sarsour’s memoir of political activism, Harry Belafonte remarks, “It wasn’t that long ago that we lost Martin and Malcom and Bobby.” He is comparing the vilification of Sarsour, the hijab-wearing, Brooklyn-born Palestinian-American, for her anti-Israeli politics to the murderous racist violence of the 1960s. It seems a stretch.
The Passover Haggadah could hardly be more different from the Torah. A Torah scroll is housed in a synagogue.
“The understandable desire to find Mengele alive and try him, presumably on television, contributed to a reluctance on the part of some to accept the fact of his death.”
What quality did people see in David Ben-Gurion that made him indispensable, when so many other qualities made him plainly impossible?
Robert Siegel spoke with Susan Neiman, author of Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil. Read the interview in our September/October 2019 issue here.
Monuments, holidays and patriotic anthems typically celebrate love of country and pride in national history, but since the end of World War II, Berlin has been an exception.
Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time Robert Siegel Review
Robert Siegel Reviews Deborah Lipstadt’s new book, Antisemitism, and Mark Weitzmann’s Hate: The Rising Tide
of Anti-Semitism in France.
Robert Siegel spoke with Zachary Leader, author of the new biography The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005, at a bookstore in Washington, DC. Bellow “has fantastic mimetic powers, imaginative powers,” Leader says, “and he created a range of reference in his language that was new and more fairly American than the style of his predecessors.” Read the full interview from our latest issue here.
