Staff Picks: Weimar Berlin, Jewish Jazz and Ben Gurion’s Rice
What we’re reading—and watching—this week.
What we’re reading—and watching—this week.
When Rosenwald decided to give away hundreds of thousands of dollars to mark his fiftieth birthday, Booker T. Washington encouraged him to donate a portion of the money to build schools for African American children in the segregated south.
What we’re reading—and watching—this week.
Although she was a trailblazer, second-wave feminists in the 1960s disliked her, and she returned their ire, describing them as “crazy women who burn their bras and…hate men.” Meir resented attempts to turn her into a feminist icon.
During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump proclaimed at a rally that Hillary Clinton “got schlonged” in the 2008 primaries. Schlong, when used as a noun, is a Yiddish word for penis—and a pretty vulgar one at that. But when used as a verb, is it even a word?
When Charlotte (called Lotte by her family) was eight years old, her mother died. At the time she was told the cause was influenza—the truth was kept a carefully guarded secret.
Zionism has always been a fiercely ideological movement. Socialist Labor Zionism gave rise to Israel’s Labor Party and to many of Israel’s best-known leaders, such as David Ben-Gurion, Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin.
Dara Horn’s new novel, Eternal Life, imagines two characters who have made a sacred pact that consigns them to lives that will never end. Tethered to wearying and repetitive perpetuity, they cannot encounter the crossover from purpose to purposelessness that my mother-in-law experienced.
“I have these vocal cords. Two,” the singer Art Garfunkel writes near the start of his intriguing book of impressionistic musings about his life, “They have vibrated with the love of sound since I was five and began to sing with the sense of God’s gift running through me.”
As 2017 comes to a close, here are some of the best books we read this year.
We want to hear from you: What’s the best book you read in 2017?