Book Review: The Double Life of a Female Jewish Crime Boss
Fredericka Mandelbaum was a pillar of New York City’s law-abiding Jewish community. That is until she became a crime boss in the late 19th Century.
Book Review | Is Motherhood Bigger Than Reality?
What is it about motherhood, especially early motherhood, that has been propelling novelists lately toward the surreal and the supernatural?
Book Review | Love and Fear Drove a Dogged TV Pioneer
This fascinating, dense and lengthy volume, sets Barbara Walters’s life in context with detailed descriptions of the world in which she maneuvered and the contradiction between her public and private personas.
Book Review | Noah Feldman Explains Us To Ourselves
Noah Feldman’s “To Be A Jew” Today offers readers from many branches of the Jewish family tree a glimpse of other boughs and limbs and what their close and distant cousins in Jewishness make of life in the family.
The Israeli Diaspora Finds A Voice
Moment critic-at-large Carlin Romano reviews the three-part novel series “The Hebrew Teacher” by Maya Arad.
Four Novels of 2023 That Are More Jewish Than You Thought
2023 was one of those years when we really, really needed our books.
Book Review | Hollywood Gets the Mamet Treatment
Through all the multiple David Mamets, one personality remains constant: a bold, aggressive, exceedingly confident, superbly well-read, arguably narcissistic provocateur.
Book Review | Revisiting a 1920s Thrill Kill
Jewish Baby Boomers like me grew up hearing about Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold Jr. because they were two intellectually precocious, rich Chicago teenagers who were also Jewish.
Book Review | The Maker and Breaker of Ideas
In 1974, Martin Peretz and his wife Anne bought The New Republic with her money.
Book Review | The Baggage You Can’t Leave Behind
A tradition at my friend’s Passover seder is for guests to go around the table and say what they would carry with them when leaving Egypt.
Book Review | The Voice Behind the ‘SWISH!’
For more than four decades after he was suddenly and unceremoniously removed from participation in the 100-meter relay race at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Marty Glickman—then a young athlete, later a beloved voice of New York sports radio—vaguely and quietly chalked up the greatest disappointment of his life to “politics.”
Book Review | From Half a Line to Hebrew Heroine
Feldman not only recovers these female characters but brings together the traditional rabbinic commentaries on these marginal or marginalized women.