Book Review // The Extra by A.B. Yehoshua
There is a tradition, more prominent in theater than in fiction, of the unwanted guest. One thinks of such works as Kaufman and Hart’s 1939 play The Man Who Came to Dinner; the 1967 Stanley Kramer-directed Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner...
Book Review // Rhapsody in Schmaltz
Rhapsody in Schmaltz is not a book to devour in one sitting, nor should it be casually nibbled. Something of an oxymoron, this witty, entertaining volume overflows with food for thought and thoughts about food. It is stuffed with Talmudic arguments, biblical injunctions, slyly sexual linguistic tropes, and
Book Review // The Yid
Paul Goldberg’s debut novel, The Yid, may remind many of its readers of the movies of director and screenwriter Quentin Tarantino, and especially his 2009 World War II film Inglourious Basterds [sic], in which a French-Jewish cinema proprietor and a Jewish-American military squad work together to assassinate Hitler and others.
Book Review // Trouble in the Tribe
If you ever want to convince someone not to be Jewish, invite them to an argument over Israel. The rancor, the ignorance, the accusations of racism and anti-Semitism—there’s a reason the topic is often banned from polite conversation: The conversation is rarely polite.
Book Review // Sailor and Fiddler
I recently asked undergraduates in my Jewish literature class at George Washington University whether the name Herman Wouk meant anything to any of them. Not a single hand went up; not a single nod of recognition. Caine Mutiny? No response.
Book Review // Disraeli: The Novel Politician
David Cesarani’s succinct new biography of preeminent Victorian statesman and novelist Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), Disraeli: The Novel Politician, challenges the commonly held view of Disraeli as having played a heroic role in Jewish history.
Speaking Volumes // Austin Ratner on E.L. Doctorow
Many writers seem daunted by the autobiographical novel—ashamed to write of themselves, as if that were either self-indulgence or exploitation. And of course with James Joyce and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a paragon, many do not even dare to try. But Joyce didn’t frighten off E.L. Doctorow, who mined his own Depression-era childhood in New York for the 1986 National Book Award-winning World’s Fair.
Book Review // Khirbet Khizeh
On 1979, an Israeli censorship committee chaired by the justice minister deleted five evocative paragraphs from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s memoir: his first-person account of the expulsion of Arab residents from the towns of Lydda and Ramle during Israel’s War of Independence in 1947-49. The description contradicted the heroic official line, which pictured Arabs as fleeing the fighting, not being deliberately forced out by Israeli forces.
Book Review // Why Not Say What Happened
WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENED:Â
A Sentimental Education
Morris Dickstein
Liveright Publishing Corporation
W.W. Norton
2015, pp. 320 $27.95
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Review by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
In the foreword of his affecting memoir, Why Not...
Book Review // The Girl from Human Street
The Girl from Human Street by Roger Cohen // Alfred A. Knopf // 2015, pp. 320, $27.95
Curating a New Jewish Canon
When Jack Miles approached me with the proposition to edit the Judaism volume of the projected Norton Anthology of World Religions, I was naturally flattered but also confounded. There are, of course, many anthologies of Judaism in different formats. But the Norton anthologies are different.
Book Review: Eichmann Before Jerusalem
Eichman Before Jeruslem: The Unexamined Life ofa Mass Murderer / Bettina Stangneth / Translated from the German by Ruth Martin / Alfred A. Knopf / 2014, pp. 579, $35