Book Review | The Colorful Crew Who Unlocked the Past
“It is clearly not a flawless book, but it is definitely a good read.”
Book Review | A Language Forged in Fire
The novel brings overdue attention to the fate of the Yiddish language in the Holocaust, seeing it as a victim in its own right.
Book Review | A Tale of Dueling Abrahams
Julius’s story tells us what Jews have made of Abraham.
Book Review | Jews at the End of the World
Families, cities and planets are “atomized,” seemingly beyond redemption, in this hellscape of a novel.
Book Review | The Failure of Aryan Physics
The spiraling arms race of the Cold War was thus set off by the bomb that German physicists recognized was beyond their reach.
Book Review | A Rebbe with a Fiddle and No Followers
“There is much to be charmed by in this novel and even more to learn from it.”
Book Review | With Critics Like These, Israel Will Be Fine
The irony of both books is that they replicate the intellectual sins they ascribe to Zionists—one-sided descriptions of Israeli actions, lack of self-criticism, and suffocating certainty.
Book Review | Kiss Me, I’m Irish and Jewish!
The two million Eastern European Jews who migrated to the United States between 1870 and the outbreak of World War I had been preceded by smaller movements of Jews to America: in colonial times, hundreds of Sephardim who fled Inquisitions; later, tens of thousands of Central European, mostly German, Jews who came, saw and prospered phenomenally in the middle of the 19th century.
Book Review | The Young, the Rich and the Guilty
"They were the shining realization of the Jewish American dream, people who could load their plates with all that this country had to offer.”
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.