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.
Book Review | Sifting Through Memory with Cynthia Ozick
Antiquities is peak Cynthia Ozick. This novel is a tiny peephole into the purpose of living in a world that outlasts us.
Book Review | The Dark Origins of Polish Revisionism
In February, in a case that made international headlines and provoked widespread condemnation, a court in Warsaw ordered two Polish historians of the Shoah to apologize to an elderly woman from the village of Malinowo for having “inexactly portrayed” her uncle Edward Malinowski, the village’s wartime headman.
Book Review | A Family in Pen and Ink
In the rise and fall of Hitler’s Germany, villains, victims and heroes figure profusely and are easily recognized.
Book Review | The Power of DNA, Dolls and Delis
Last month, The New York Times published a piece called “Saying Goodbye to Hanukkah.”
Book Review | Making Room for Ghosts
Sutzkever’s “essential prose,” which could also be called “prose poetry” or “brief narratives,” has slipped by, little noticed. Until now.
Book Review | The Failure of Impartiality
Barack Obama’s transformation from youthful and eloquent U.S. Senate candidate to prime-time sensation and putative presidential timber came at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
Book Review | A Writer Winks at Her City
Every movie I watch now is a movie about an entire cast of people who seem to not have cancer, or at least this is, to me, its plot,” Anne Boyer observes in The Undying, her recent Pulitzer Prize-winning inquiry into cancer.
Book Review | A Spymaster Breaks His Silence
When you start reading a memoir by a former spy, you always hope for descriptions of bloody assassinations, break-ins into banks and embassies, and heart-pounding high-speed chases.
Book Review | A Poet Talks to Hashem—and Trump
Alicia Ostriker’s new collection comprises selected poems from seven previous volumes. Ostriker has been an important poet for the past 45 years.