“And the Bride Closed the Door” is a broad comedy about a bride who refuses to go forward with her wedding ceremony, sowing havoc. The book captures a segment of Mizrahi society not often featured in Israeli fiction.
The story of the interactions between Jews in Israel and the Jewish and gentile supporters of Israel in the United States is complex and colored by the unique conditions that led to Israel’s birth.
It is very difficult to come up with a catalog of books for a literary tour of Israel. No matter how long the list, there will always be disagreements and arguments about the canon, what is included and what is left out.
The stories that David de Jong first reported for Bloomberg News and now recounts in his book Nazi Billionaires document the sordid embrace of the Nazi regime by Germany’s wealthiest industrial dynasties and those dynasties’ continued prosperity today.
The latest cycle of public panic over book-banning—as distinct from the constant, threatening drumbeat of book-banning itself—kicked off last January when The New York Times reported that a school board in McMinn County, Tennessee, had withdrawn Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel/memoir Maus: A Survivor’s Tale from the eighth-grade Holocaust education curriculum.
Robert Pinsky’s father, an Orthodox Jewish optician in Long Branch, New Jersey, liked to sum up success stories with a favorite phrase: “It all worked out okay.”
The Morgenthaus, the late New York mayor Ed Koch once said, were “the closest thing we’ve got to royalty in New York City.”
Mary Rodgers’s posthumous autobiography is a brash, outrageous and entertaining excursion into the life of its author.
When the ancient rabbis had a question about the Torah—an important detail that seemed to be missing, an inconsistency between two passages, even a redundant word or verse—they would often solve the problem by writing a midrash, or story, filling in the missing piece or reconciling the seeming contradiction.
When the state of Israel turned 30 in 1978, its supporters in Hollywood threw a star-studded party. What changed?
