Book Review | With Critics Like These, Israel Will Be Fine
The irony of both books is that they replicate the intellectual sins they ascribe to Zionists—one-sided descriptions of Israeli actions, lack of self-criticism, and suffocating certainty.
Book Review | Kiss Me, I’m Irish and Jewish!
The two million Eastern European Jews who migrated to the United States between 1870 and the outbreak of World War I had been preceded by smaller movements of Jews to America: in colonial times, hundreds of Sephardim who fled Inquisitions; later, tens of thousands of Central European, mostly German, Jews who came, saw and prospered phenomenally in the middle of the 19th century.
Book Review | The Young, the Rich and the Guilty
“They were the shining realization of the Jewish American dream, people who could load their plates with all that this country had to offer.”
Book Review: The Double Life of a Female Jewish Crime Boss
Fredericka Mandelbaum was a pillar of New York City’s law-abiding Jewish community. That is until she became a crime boss in the late 19th Century.
Book Review | Is Motherhood Bigger Than Reality?
What is it about motherhood, especially early motherhood, that has been propelling novelists lately toward the surreal and the supernatural?
Book Review | Love and Fear Drove a Dogged TV Pioneer
This fascinating, dense and lengthy volume, sets Barbara Walters’s life in context with detailed descriptions of the world in which she maneuvered and the contradiction between her public and private personas.
Summer Reads for Sun—and Shade
Spies in the Warsaw Ghetto! Ob/Gyns on Everest! Handmaids of Ancient Canaan!
Book Review | Noah Feldman Explains Us To Ourselves
Noah Feldman’s “To Be A Jew” Today offers readers from many branches of the Jewish family tree a glimpse of other boughs and limbs and what their close and distant cousins in Jewishness make of life in the family.
Book Review | An Ancient Book Illuminates Our Troubled Times
The first time I found myself in synagogue for the chanting of the Book of Kohelet, or Ecclesiastes—typically read by Ashkenazi Jews during the Shabbat of Sukkot, the fall harvest festival—my first astonished thought was that I’d wandered into the wrong room, or at least picked up the wrong book.
Book Review | Ukraine’s Zelensky, Warts and All
The rise of Volodymyr Zelensky from comic improv-artist-turned-movie-star, to wealthy producer, to wartime leader of a besieged Ukraine is improbable enough to invite hyperbole.
A Vision of Decency and Hope: Why James McBride Is Today’s Charles Dickens
Both writers weave intricate yet leisurely plots and present an array of colorful, characters. Above all, they portray a fundamental decency and a hopeful vision.
Book Review | She Came, She Sang, She Conquered
Barbra Streisand remains the single most powerful and enduring female Jewish cultural figure of my lifetime, writes Glenn Frankel.