Book Review | Why the Left Left Israel
Vivian Gornick reviews Susie Linfield’s The Lions’ Den, a book critiquing the Left’s stance on Israel through a variety of notable thinkers, including Hannah Arendt, Noam Chomsky, and others.
Vivian Gornick reviews Susie Linfield’s The Lions’ Den, a book critiquing the Left’s stance on Israel through a variety of notable thinkers, including Hannah Arendt, Noam Chomsky, and others.
Author Geraldine Brooks reviews Nathan Englander’s new book, kaddish.com
Robert Siegel Reviews Deborah Lipstadt’s new book, Antisemitism, and Mark Weitzmann’s Hate: The Rising Tide
of Anti-Semitism in France.
In Prince of the Press, Joshua Teplitsky brings us inside David Oppenheim’s library to explore the ways this collection both reflected and shaped the intellectual heritage of Central European Jewry.
The great French film director Jean-Luc Godard called Ben Hecht a “genius” who “invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood today.” Yet most modern American Jews have likely never heard of Hecht, despite his eminence as a playwright, best-selling novelist and screenwriter of a host of Hollywood film classics.
American Jews may not know their way around the Talmud or much about Jewish history, but they sure do excel at soul-searching and have for many, many years. In the late 19th century, in the mid-20th and again in our own day, taking the community’s pulse—and finding it weak and listless—has been a common pursuit and a constant refrain.
The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, 3 vols. by Robert Alter W. W. Norton 2018, 3500 pp, $125 When
Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land by Amos Oz Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2018, 138 pp, $15.31 Amos Oz’s modest
Reading Beirut Rules takes us back to the unhappy 1980s when American diplomats, spies, and the military would be assigned to the Middle East—a complex and dangerous region that very few of them understood—and became sitting ducks for increasingly sophisticated terrorists who were financed and directed by Iran.
Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home Nora Krug Scribner 2018, 288 pp., $30 All drawings by and photos
Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States By Bradley W. Hart St. Martin’s/Thomas Dunne Books 2018,
The First Book of Jewish Jokes Edited by Elliott Oring Translated by Michaela Lang Indiana University Press 2018, 176 pp,