Book Review | The Life of a Library
In Prince of the Press, Joshua Teplitsky brings us inside David Oppenheim’s library to explore the ways this collection both reflected and shaped the intellectual heritage of Central European Jewry.
Book Review | Hollywood’s Proud Zionist
The great French film director Jean-Luc Godard called Ben Hecht a “genius” who “invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood today.” Yet most modern American Jews have likely never heard of Hecht, despite his eminence as a playwright, best-selling novelist and screenwriter of a host of Hollywood film classics.
Book Review | The American Jewish Identity Crisis Rages On
American Jews may not know their way around the Talmud or much about Jewish history, but they sure do excel at soul-searching and have for many, many years. In the late 19th century, in the mid-20th and again in our own day, taking the community’s pulse—and finding it weak and listless—has been a common pursuit and a constant refrain.
Book Review | The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, 3 vols. by Robert Alter
The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, 3 vols.
by Robert Alter
W. W. Norton
2018, 3500 pp, $125
When I first learned that Robert Alter had completed the...
Book Review | Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land by Amos Oz
Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land
by Amos Oz
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2018, 138 pp, $15.31
Amos Oz’s modest new book of nonfiction is a container for some...
A German-American Artist Searches for a Cultural Identity
“How do you know who you are, if you don’t understand where you come from?” Nora Krug asks toward the beginning of her stunning visual memoir, Belonging: A German Reckons With History And Home.
Carl Lutz: Gently Shaking the World
While Jews honor heroes like Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg, the name of Carl Lutz is virtually unknown.
Book Review | Beirut Rules
Reading Beirut Rules takes us back to the unhappy 1980s when American diplomats, spies, and the military would be assigned to the Middle East—a complex and dangerous region that very few of them understood—and became sitting ducks for increasingly sophisticated terrorists who were financed and directed by Iran.
Illustrated Book Review | Belonging by Nora Krug
Belonging:
A German Reckons with History and Home
Nora Krug
Scribner
2018, 288 pp., $30
All drawings by and photos courtesy of Amy Kurzweil, inspired by Nora Krug
Book Review | Hitler’s American Friends By Bradley W. Hart
Hitler’s American Friends:
The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States
By Bradley W. Hart
St. Martin’s/Thomas Dunne Books
2018, 304 pp, $28.99
Four days after Pearl Harbor and the...
Book Review | The First Book of Jewish Jokes edited by Elliott Oring
The First Book of Jewish Jokes
Edited by Elliott Oring
Translated by Michaela Lang
Indiana University Press
2018, 176 pp, $65
It’s the inherent vice of joke books that their...
Book Review | Kafka’s Last Trial by Ruby Namdar
Few literary figures have stirred readers’ imaginations as much as Kafka, his tormented life and early death. Indeed, he is viewed as a mythical figure as much as a renowned author. But above all, the bizarre story of how Kafka’s work survived and entered the canon has become a staple of literary legend.