Smashing Idols, Then and Now
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.
Book Review | Philip Roth’s Jewish America
The first time I read a book by Philip Roth, I read it from back to front.
Book Review | ‘We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders’
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 Haggadah: A Book of Beloved Imperfections
The Passover Haggadah could hardly be more different from the Torah. A Torah scroll is housed in a synagogue.
Book Review | Angels of Death on Trial
“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.”
Book Review | The Passions of a Prime Minister, Revealed
What quality did people see in David Ben-Gurion that made him indispensable, when so many other qualities made him plainly impossible?
LISTEN: Robert Siegel Interviews Susan Neiman
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.
What America Can Learn From Germany
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.
Book Review | A Jewish Outsider in Paris
Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time Robert Siegel Review
Book Review | How Bad Is It?
Robert Siegel Reviews Deborah Lipstadt’s new book, Antisemitism, and Mark Weitzmann’s Hate: The Rising Tide
of Anti-Semitism in France.
LISTEN: Robert Siegel Interviews Zachary Leader
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.
Author Interview | Biographer Zachary Leader on Saul Bellow
With publication of the second and final volume of his monumental biography of Saul Bellow, Zachary Leader, a professor of English literature at the University of Roehampton in London, has completed a decade-long immersion in Bellow’s life and letters.