By Ranen Omer-Sherman
His strident politics notwithstanding, Mark Helprin’s magically descriptive powers have rendered up some of the most genuinely adventurous writing of our time.
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By Ranen Omer-Sherman
Sayed Kashua’s ‘Second Person Singular’ illuminates Israeli Arabs’ fraught condition as insiders and outsiders and their painful struggle to create a life of meaning.
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By Ranen Omer-Sherman
FORWARD BOOKS SPECIAL: Novelist Meir Shalev tells the true story of his grandmother. She’s a Zionist heroine in her own mind, and a deranged malcontent to everyone else.
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By Ranen Omer-Sherman
In the world of comics, Israel has a long and lively culture of illustrated political commentary. There’s even an Israeli Museum of Caricature and Comics in Holon to honor that tradition. Contemporary work from graphic novelists such as Rutu Modan, Yirmi Pinkus and Asaf Hanuka is attracting international raves, and the scene is filled with emerging talent. The young artist Sivan Hurvitz stands out, though, for her highly controversial series, “Turn Right at the End.” Based on her senior undergraduate thesis at the Holon Institute of Technology, the show imaginatively critiques what she and many others perceive as alarmingly anti-democratic and intolerant tendencies in contemporary Israel. Set in possible future Israels, Hurvitz’s scenes may repel some and provoke sadness, recognition or unease in others, but her visceral imagery will leave nobody untouched. Her Zion, rendered as both familiar and unknown, is at a turning point in its history.
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By Ranen Omer-Sherman
There is a moment in David Grossman’s novel, “See Under: Love,” when an Israeli son of Holocaust survivors gazes at his own sleeping child and remarks to his beaming wife: “‘It’s a good thing he can sleep through all the noise… He may have to sleep with tanks passing in the streets someday.’” Perhaps that stark utterance was the catalyst for Grossman’s latest novel, “To the End of the Land,” with its gripping meditation on love, war, suffering and rebirth. In the future, this may be regarded as Israel’s definitive anti-war novel, but that does not begin to account for its shattering poetry, nor for its incandescent empathy for characters whose euphoria and sorrows are fully revealed.Read More
As First Maharats Graduate, Orthodox Women Leap Forward
Why a Rabbi Should Not Marry Outside the Faith
Why I Only Date Jewish Guys
Taking Aim at Corporate Jewish Burial Business
Barbra Streisand Visits Western Wall After Landing in Israel With Puppy
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