Book Review // Alexandrian Summer
The recent English-language publication of Yitzhak Gormezano Goren’s Alexandrian Summer, writes Juliana Maio, attests to the fact that the story of the Jews of the Arab world, long neglected, is ready to be heard.
Book Review // Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps
In her compelling study of the role of the camps in the early years of the Nazi regime, Kim Wünschmann shows that they were “instrumental” in the development of the plan to transform German Jewry into a special category of enemy, deserving not just of brutal treatment but of eradication altogether.
Book Review // Killing a King
The assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin 20 years ago produced instant analysis of unusual accuracy. Typically, it takes decades for the air to clear enough for history to make a sound judgment, especially in the Middle East. But when Rabin was shot in the back in November 1995, the Israelis of various camps who either mourned or celebrated what they thought the murder meant for their country turned out to be exactly right.
Book Review // The Cost of Courage
The darkness lurking around the edges of heroism is the underlying and faintly troubling theme of Charles Kaiser’s The Cost of Courage, the story of a French family and the steep price its members paid for their work in the Resistance.
Book Review // The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne
As a university student in Warsaw in the first half of the 1970s, I used to spend much of my summer vacation hitchhiking around the country. This is how one fine July day I found myself in Jedwabne, a nondescript but beautifully located small town in Poland’s Northeast. Wandering through the meadows and forests, I lost my sense of direction and eventually had to ask a local for the road out of town.
Book Review // The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic forgery published in Russia in 1903, has been called a “warrant for genocide.” However, as early as the 12th century in England, what is now known as “the blood libel”—the false accusation that Jews murdered Christian children for their blood—may be the original warrant that gave the world a pretext to deny the Jewish people a place in civilized society.
Book Review // On the Move
There is a seeming transparency in the prose of On the Move, the late Oliver Sacks’s memoir about leaving home and the divergent, sometimes vagabond, life he made.
Book Review // Lincoln and the Jews: A History
In this probing, lavishly illustrated volume, the historian of American Jewry, Jonathan Sarna, and Benjamin Shapell, a leading collector of Civil War documents and artifacts, interweave two texts: a chronicle of Lincoln’s cordial relations with Jews and an extensive gallery of letters, photos and prints.
Book Review // Léon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist
In November 1938, as Hitler was preaching his gospel of hate, French Prime Minister Léon Blum delivered a speech to the International League Against Anti-Semitism about “the tragic Jewish question.” Urging European nations to open their doors to the growing number of Jewish refugees who had been condemned “to a bitter and unfortunate fate,” he left no doubt about his identity…
Book Review // The Pawnbroker’s Daughter: A Memoir
The recently published posthumous publication, The Pawnbroker’s Daughter: A Memoir, draws attention to the powers of endurance of the American Jewish poet Maxine Kumin (1925-2014). The Yiddish word for strength, koyach, might have been the middle name of Kumin, a skilled swimmer and horsewoman who battled back after a near-fatal carriage-driving accident at age 73
Book Review // Ally
Ally would have been a more effective book if Oren had taken the time to consider the impact of his take-no-prisoners approach, writes Glenn Frankel.
Book Review // A Replacement Life
For Slava Gelman, Fishman’s main character, finding a balance between his Russian and American selves proves difficult.