Book Review | Beneath the City of God
The rabbinic tradition speaks of a Jerusalem above and a Jerusalem below.
Book Review | The First Covid Comedy
As Jonathan Safran Foer pioneered the 9/11 novel, so Shteyngart does for COVID.
Were Birmingham’s Civil Rights Era Jews ‘Inside Agitators’?
Calvin Trillin, an incomparable reporter, brought his wry, Midwestern Jewish perspective to coverage of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, first for Time magazine and then for The New Yorker. He once observed, tongue in cheek, that it must have been awfully crowded in the South back then “behind the scenes.”
Book Review | The Mother of Hadassah—and Israel
“Wherever she sat and led the discussion, there was the head of the table.” Thus observed an early associate of Henrietta Szold’s in Hadassah, the powerhouse American women’s Zionist organization that she founded in 1912.
Book Review | America’s Homegrown Jewish Terrorist
For liberal supporters of Israel, the unresolved status of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza presents a dilemma: a choice between a single state with so many Arab citizens as to inevitably dilute the Jewish character of the country, or the insistence of control over but denial of equal rights to millions of Palestinians, diluting if not destroying Israel’s democratic character.
Book Review | Do Murdered Jews Speak Louder?
As the author of five highly regarded novels, ranging from the award-winning In the Image (2002) to the memorably time-shifting Eternal Life (2018), Dara Horn is recognized as an accomplished fiction writer and as a storyteller who draws inspiration from centuries of Jewish history.
Memory Speaks, But It Doesn’t Always Tell the Truth
Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother’s Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind
By Julie Metz
Atria Books; 320 pages; $28
The Eve in the...
Book Review | When Honor Fades
Morningside Heights
By Joshua Henkin
Knopf Doubleday; 304 pp.; $26.95
During the early days of the pandemic, I noticed many readers craving dramatic stories in exotic settings to...
Book Review | Greed, Drugs and Philanthropy
In this time of corrective unnamings—to remove traces of admiration or gratitude for the morally reevaluated—the names of unrepentant slaveholders, Confederate generals, contemporary sexual predators and other assorted wrongdoers have been erased or proposed for erasure from college dorms, military bases, city streets and more.
Book Review | Waiting for the Messiah in Williamsburg
How did the Satmar Hasidim come to dominate the Brooklyn neighborhood known as Williamsburg?
Book Review | Building Community One Tile at a Time
At the Museum at Eldridge Street’s Egg Rolls, Egg Creams and Empanadas street festival—a celebration of Ashkenazi Jewish, Chinese and Puerto Rican communities held each summer (pre-pandemic) on New York’s Lower East Side—groups of Chinese Americans and American Jewish women play mahjong side by side, sometimes pausing to teach younger festivalgoers how to play.
Book Review | A Writer Irreverent Even in Death
Even those familiar with the prolific English novelist and essayist Jenny Diski (1947-2016) don’t think of her as primarily a “Jewish” writer.