Arts & Culture

Built Judaism:

By Samuel D. Gruber

Architecture has been an important way in which Jews have defined themselves within their own community, as well as the pre-eminent means of projecting Jewish identity to the gentile world. Palaces of Prayer, a new exhibit at the Angel Orensanz Foundation on New York’s Lower East Side, includes 70 superb color prints of synagogues thatRead More

Emigrés Are Forming Decidedly Secular Identities; The Ancestral Faith, With a Side of Salami

By Nathaniel Popper

This is the final installment in a three-part series on the challenges faced in the United States by immigrants from the former Soviet Union.A half an hour before a late-season minor league baseball game at Keyspan Park, in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, a series of Russian performers took the field to dance and sing for the fewRead More

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Once and Future Yiddish Language

By Zackary Sholem Berger

Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish By Dovid Katz Basic Books, 430 pages, $26.95. ———Given the sentimentality of much recent writing on the subject, American Jews might be forgiven for believing that no one with a critical eye, or without sepia-colored glasses, possibly could write an entire book about Yiddish — much less aRead More

FALL BOOKS

By Josh Lambert

The Final Solution: A Story of Detection By Michael Chabon. Fourth Estate/HarperCollins, 144 pages, $16.95. —–Depending on their authors’ predilections, so-called “literary” novels are often unsettling, disturbing, enlightening or tragicomic. They are not, in the main, much fun. Fun is left to hacks, those genre writers who churn outRead More

A Dutch Author Relishes the Spectacle

By Allison Schachter

Phantom Pain By Arnon Grunberg Other Press, 286 pages, $22. ——In Arnon Grunberg’s novel “Story of My Baldness,” which has just been released in English translation, the Dutch novelist adopted a new literary persona: Marek van der Jagt, as both theRead More

FALL BOOKS

By Ilan Stavans

Letters 1928-1946: Isaiah Berlin Edited by Henry Hardy Cambridge University Press, 755 pages, $40. ——-A couple of years ago, while visiting the offices of The Atlantic Monthly, I commented on my admiration of Isaiah Berlin to a friend of mine, Cullen Murphy, the magazine’s executive editor. Few modern thinkers strike me as beingRead More

FALL BOOKS

By Ralph Seliger

A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies By James Bamford Doubleday, 420 pages, $26.95. * * *This past August, the news broke of an FBI probe into a possible leak to Israel of classified intelligence information via the pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The leak wasRead More

Gleanings

One in a series of occasional excerpts from books that catch our eye. The following is an excerpt from “Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt-Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives, and Broken Hearts,” by Julian Rubinstein (Little, Brown). In it, Rubinstein offers a hilarious account of crimeRead More

Wealth and Strife: Can Rich Relatives Live Together?

By Peretz Rodman

Lot and Abram, nephew and uncle, had migrated together from Mesopotamia to Canaan, and from Canaan down to Egypt. Now they returned together from Egypt to Canaan. Here, after traveling a long and arduous path, side by side, they reached a parting of the ways.Both men, the Torah tells us, had attained wealth. “Abram was heavily laden with cattle,Read More

Amos Oz, On Himself

By Helen Epstein

A Tale of Love and Darkness By Amos Oz Harcourt, 544 pages, $26. ———Since 1968, when his novel “My Michael” — exquisitely narrated by a despairing young wife in Jerusalem — mesmerized thousands of readers, Amos Oz has been recognized as one of Israel’s most gifted and prolific authors. He has produced 22 books — 11 novels,Read More