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 | 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 | Waiting for the Messiah in Williamsburg
How did the Satmar Hasidim come to dominate the Brooklyn neighborhood known as Williamsburg?
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 | 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.
Cynthia Ozick: In Defense of Imagination
Every few years, a YouTube clip makes its way around the literary corners of the internet: A young Cynthia Ozick stands up at a 1971 panel on feminism featuring Norman Mailer.
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.
‘American Baby’: Ethics of Jewish Adoption Explored Through a Tragic Family Story
Best-selling author Gabrielle Glaser’s new book, American Baby, starts with a dying cantor’s search for a mother he never met. It shares the intimate, intricate...
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.