Nine years have passed since the mysterious death of Ashraf Marwan, the senior Egyptian government official who volunteered to spy for Israel’s Mossad. Marwan remains at the center of a bitter controversy over why the October 1973 attack that launched the Yom Kippur War took Israel by surprise.
There is a tradition, more prominent in theater than in fiction, of the unwanted guest. One thinks of such works as Kaufman and Hart’s 1939 play The Man Who Came to Dinner; the 1967 Stanley Kramer-directed Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner…
Rhapsody in Schmaltz is not a book to devour in one sitting, nor should it be casually nibbled. Something of an oxymoron, this witty, entertaining volume overflows with food for thought and thoughts about food. It is stuffed with Talmudic arguments, biblical injunctions, slyly sexual linguistic tropes, and
Paul Goldberg’s debut novel, The Yid, may remind many of its readers of the movies of director and screenwriter Quentin Tarantino, and especially his 2009 World War II film Inglourious Basterds [sic], in which a French-Jewish cinema proprietor and a Jewish-American military squad work together to assassinate Hitler and others.
If you ever want to convince someone not to be Jewish, invite them to an argument over Israel. The rancor, the ignorance, the accusations of racism and anti-Semitism—there’s a reason the topic is often banned from polite conversation: The conversation is rarely polite.
I recently asked undergraduates in my Jewish literature class at George Washington University whether the name Herman Wouk meant anything to any of them. Not a single hand went up; not a single nod of recognition. Caine Mutiny? No response.
David Cesarani’s succinct new biography of preeminent Victorian statesman and novelist Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), Disraeli: The Novel Politician, challenges the commonly held view of Disraeli as having played a heroic role in Jewish history.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
