Book Interview | Anita Diamant and the Pursuit of Menstrual Justice
A whole generation has gone through the Jewish life cycle with Anita Diamant.
31
Jan
22
Jun
Laughing at Myself with Father and Son Duo – former Congressman Dan Glickman and Hollywood producer Jonathan Glickman
Dan Glickman has done it all – from serving in the U.S. House of Representative to becoming the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture to serving as Chairman of the Motion Picture Association. In his new book, Laughing at Myself: My Education in Congress, on the Farm, and at the Movies, Dan shares how a Jewish midwestern kid with Russian and Eastern European immigrant grandparents made his way from Kansas to Washington, DC and Hollywood and survived to tell the story. Glickman is interviewed by his son, Hollywood producer and former president of MGM Motion Picture Group, Jonathan Glickman. Held in celebration of Father’s Day.
17
May
The Acid That Burns: Joy Ladin on The Book of Anna
The Book of Anna
By Joy Ladin
EOAGH Books, March 2021
$20, 151 pp.
The Book of Anna is a fictional narrative that tells the story of Czech-German Holocaust survivor Anna Asher’s life after the war in 1950s Prague. Through poems and prose diary entries, Anna struggles to make sense of the dissonance between the horrors she experienced and Jewish thought. A tapestry woven with biblical allusions and Talmudic references, The Book of Anna stands out among the piles of Holocaust literature seeking to explain the inexplicable.
The book’s initial publication in 2006 solidified author, poet and professor Joy Ladin’s tenure position at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women, but otherwise went unnoticed. Still living as a man named Jay at the time, Ladin published Anna under the initial J. Ladin. For the recent rerelease of the book, Ladin changed...
25
Mar
‘American Baby’: Ethics of Jewish Adoption Explored Through a Tragic Family Story
Best-selling author Gabrielle Glaser’s new book, American Baby, starts with a dying cantor’s search for a mother he never met. It shares the intimate, intricate stories of two Jewish families: the teen couple in love who gave him life and the loving Holocaust survivors who raised him. It also unveils—in incredibly rich detail—a disturbing history of adoption practices in America, and in the American Jewish community, in the mid-20th century. Glaser is mom to three girls she birthed and raised and is neither an adoptee nor “birth mom.” As a journalist, though, she has been fascinated by the subject of adoption for nearly 20 years. From her home in Montclair, New Jersey, she talked with interviewer (and adoptive mom of two) Minna Scherlinder Morse.
You’ve written an incredible book, meticulously researched and captivatingly told. For those...
19
Oct
Book Interview: Isabel Wilkerson on Racism and Caste Systems
The title of her new book is Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. It retells the history of American racism from slavery to segregation, from everyday indignities to the use of lethal force. Throughout, she strives to write not of whites and Blacks, but of the majority caste and the minority caste.
02
Oct
When Spring Turned to Winter in the Middle East
Harvard law professor Noah Feldman’s book about Arab political self-determination and self-destruction is called The Arab Winter: A Tragedy. And he really means it. Grief emanates from every line of this reevaluation of the Arab Spring, which revisits the hope followed by disaster in Egypt and Syria; the utopian Islamism that produced the hellish dystopia of ISIS; and, perhaps most painful, the success in Tunisia that showed the other tragedies were not inevitable.
21
Sep
Smashing Idols, Then and Now
The demolition of a statue, the withdrawal of public adulation for the erstwhile hero the statue commemorates, has echoes of a fundamental Jewish principle: the injunction against graven images.