Book Review | The Ripples Before the Storm
Munich in the years following World War I was a nasty, bloody microcosm of the political catastrophes in Europe that preceded and followed Germany’s defeat in that war.
Book Review | The Palpable Joy of Journalism
The time is summer, 1960; the place, Washington, DC; the protagonist, 16-year-old Carl Bernstein on his way to buy a suit for a job interview as a copy boy at the Evening Star, the city’s major afternoon paper at that time.
Book Review | A Poet’s Appetite for Grief and Desire
Barbara Goldberg’s poetry has always displayed an insatiable appetite for grief and desire.
Book Review | The Politics of Paranoia, Then and Now
Almost a half-century before Donald Trump signed on to the fraudulent notion that President Barack Obama’s American citizenship and constitutional legitimacy were suspect, Robert Welch (1899-1985) reached an equally alarming conclusion about the president of his day, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Book Review | Beneath the City of God
The rabbinic tradition speaks of a Jerusalem above and a Jerusalem below.
Book Review | The First Covid Comedy
As Jonathan Safran Foer pioneered the 9/11 novel, so Shteyngart does for COVID.
Book Review | The Mother of Hadassah—and Israel
“Wherever she sat and led the discussion, there was the head of the table.” Thus observed an early associate of Henrietta Szold’s in Hadassah, the powerhouse American women’s Zionist organization that she founded in 1912.
Book Review | America’s Homegrown Jewish Terrorist
For liberal supporters of Israel, the unresolved status of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza presents a dilemma: a choice between a single state with so many Arab citizens as to inevitably dilute the Jewish character of the country, or the insistence of control over but denial of equal rights to millions of Palestinians, diluting if not destroying Israel’s democratic character.
Book Review | Do Murdered Jews Speak Louder?
As the author of five highly regarded novels, ranging from the award-winning In the Image (2002) to the memorably time-shifting Eternal Life (2018), Dara Horn is recognized as an accomplished fiction writer and as a storyteller who draws inspiration from centuries of Jewish history.
Book Review | When Honor Fades
Morningside Heights By Joshua Henkin Knopf Doubleday; 304 pp.; $26.95 During the early days of the pandemic, I noticed many
Book Review | Greed, Drugs and Philanthropy
In this time of corrective unnamings—to remove traces of admiration or gratitude for the morally reevaluated—the names of unrepentant slaveholders, Confederate generals, contemporary sexual predators and other assorted wrongdoers have been erased or proposed for erasure from college dorms, military bases, city streets and more.
Book Review | Waiting for the Messiah in Williamsburg
How did the Satmar Hasidim come to dominate the Brooklyn neighborhood known as Williamsburg?