Few literary figures have stirred readers’ imaginations as much as Kafka, his tormented life and early death. Indeed, he is viewed as a mythical figure as much as a renowned author. But above all, the bizarre story of how Kafka’s work survived and entered the canon has become a staple of literary legend.
In What We Talk About When We Talk About Hebrew, Naomi Sokoloff and Nancy Berg, both professors of Hebrew and comparative literature, successfully present a number of lenses through which the wondrous revival of the Hebrew language—and its current decline on American college campuses—can be viewed.
After Jimmy Carter became president, he moved beyond long and firm support for Israel rooted in his belief in biblical Christianity to sympathy and support for the Palestinians and other Arabs, according to his top adviser in those years.
On the Surface of Silence, the final collection of legendary Israeli poet Lea Goldberg, is a book of splendor in more ways than one. With its large 10×10 format, a beautiful cover photo of a desert landscape, a selection of mystical pen-and-ink drawings by the poet, and the haunting poems themselves in Hebrew and English on facing pages, as if afloat in a world of silence
We are waking up to the fact that Mizrachim now make up more than half of all Israeli Jews. And not only do Mizrachim come from a different part of the world, but they also continue to view Zionism, Judaism, religion and gender very differently than do Jews of European descent.
Little known in English, Aguinis has been a Latin American literary powerhouse for 50 years, turning out elegant, prize-winning bestsellers that have explored everything from Argentine history to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the life of Maimonides, all to the praise of his largely non-Jewish audience.
Since their origin in the early 1500s in Yemen and elsewhere in the Arab world, coffee houses have provided an important social meeting place for people from all walks of life, especially creative, political and business types.
Last April, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to name the main terminal at San Francisco International Airport after Harvey Milk, the gay rights martyr who was assassinated 40 years ago. The decision further (and literally) cements Milk’s legacy as the best-known LGBT activist in American history.
Entrada de la Luna, New Mexico, is a small town with a big mystery. Why do its Spanish Catholic families light candles on Friday night? Why doesn’t anyone eat pork? The answers, it turns out, lie half a millennium ago, in 15th-century Spain.
Narrated by Aaron, a wisecracking 500-year-old African Gray parrot with a penchant for Yiddish puns, the book follows Moishe, a 14-year-old who yearns for adventure after discovering his father’s book of maps.
Although a work of fiction, Mapping the Bones has enough of a historical basis to make it read like a convincing survivor’s account, one that does the essential work of bearing witness to a tattered and bloody past.
Brenner’s In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea chronicles the competing ambitions to preserve and nourish Jews and Judaism in safety, embraced by an array of Jewish thinkers and leaders from the late 19th century into the present. Would it be by assimilating into the dominant culture, as the Jewish German foreign minister Walther Rathenau argued?
