Book Review | Why the Left Left Israel
Vivian Gornick reviews Susie Linfield’s The Lions’ Den, a book critiquing the Left’s stance on Israel through a variety of notable thinkers, including Hannah Arendt, Noam Chomsky, and others.
Book Review | JDate for the Dead
Author Geraldine Brooks reviews Nathan Englander’s new book, kaddish.com
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.
Video | A Literary Evening with André Aciman and Debra Granik
André Aciman and Debra Granik discuss the art of adapting literature to film.
Alice Shalvi: Mother of Israeli Feminism
In Never a Native, Alice Shalvi, a founding mother of Israeli feminism, has written a book that is both inspiring and painful.
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.
Book Review | The Life of a Library
In Prince of the Press, Joshua Teplitsky brings us inside David Oppenheim’s library to explore the ways this collection both reflected and shaped the intellectual heritage of Central European Jewry.
Book Review | Hollywood’s Proud Zionist
The great French film director Jean-Luc Godard called Ben Hecht a “genius” who “invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood today.” Yet most modern American Jews have likely never heard of Hecht, despite his eminence as a playwright, best-selling novelist and screenwriter of a host of Hollywood film classics.
Book Review | The American Jewish Identity Crisis Rages On
American Jews may not know their way around the Talmud or much about Jewish history, but they sure do excel at soul-searching and have for many, many years. In the late 19th century, in the mid-20th and again in our own day, taking the community’s pulse—and finding it weak and listless—has been a common pursuit and a constant refrain.
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.
Amos Oz, Beloved Israeli Author, Dies at 79
Famed Israeli author Amos Oz has passed away today, aged 79, after a short battle with cancer. Perhaps the most renowned Israeli author, Oz’s work has been translated into 45 languages and won dozens of awards, including the prestigious Goethe Prize and the Israel Prize for Literature. Oz was also an activist, repeatedly advocating in favor of the two-state solution and calling for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
Book Review | The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, 3 vols. by Robert Alter
The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, 3 vols.
by Robert Alter
W. W. Norton
2018, 3500 pp, $125
When I first learned that Robert Alter had completed the...