Leonardo Padura’s Heretics is a remarkable book. Padura, who is certainly the most prominent of a small number of Jewish Cuban authors, might also be the most famous writer in Cuba today. Best known in this country for his Inspector Mario Conde detective series…
When Bob Dylan became the first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize in Literature last October, the internet erupted with reactions ranging from euphoria to dismay.
Until the 1980s, women were a small minority among Hebrew writers. There was Russian-born Rahel Bluwstein (1890–1931), considered the “founding mother” of modern Hebrew poetry by women. Esther Raab (1894–1981) was the first native-born Israeli woman poet, principally known for her rich use of modern Hebrew.
The earliest comedy I remember with any clarity was created by a famous tragic clown, a circus performer whose painted mouth was perpetually turned down in a frown. Left out of the spotlight, he carried a sledgehammer and ran after the other clowns who wouldn’t have anything to do with him.
Zornberg brings us a Moses who, with his flawed speech and insecure relationship with the Israelites, still brings the divine words to a people in need of spiritual direction.
Memory is a funny thing. Memory is something that’s irrecoverably passed, but at the same time, it’s something that we inhabit, and something that shapes us.
At the end of the 19th century, European liberals and Zionists developed diametrically opposite strategies for dealing with the menace posed by anti-Semitism…
Michael Chabon’s first published works, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and A Model World, were realist, lovely and a little dull with caution. Chabon himself describes his early work as “plotless and sparkling with epiphanic dew,”
Amos Oz’s novel Habesorah Al Pi Yehudah (The Gospel According to Judas), translated by his longtime collaborator, Nicholas de Lange, under the title Judas, opens in the winter of 1959-60, when the life of Shmuel Ash, a graduate student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is turned upside down…
At the end of the 19th century, European liberals and Zionists developed diametrically opposite strategies for dealing with the menace posed by anti-Semitism. Committed to the full integration of the Jews into the diverse societies in which they lived, the liberals tried to combat Jew-hatred through education and political action…
Decoding Chomsky Chris Knight Yale University Press 2016, pp. 304 By Robert F. Barsky Chris Knight’s new book begins with
Review by Geraldine Brooks // The greater part, the best part, the sometimes brilliant part of Jonathan Safran Foer’s new novel Here I Am takes place in this moment between that crunch of impact and inevitable fragmentation. What’s at stake is a marriage. The crunch of impact is the moment when a wife finds her husband’s secret second cellphone and reads the graphic sexual messages it contains…
