By Beth Kissileff
Finally, a novel about Israel by an American Jew that’s written well and without sentimentality. Joan Leegant’s “Wherever You Go” is unafraid to address the pivotal but ambiguous role that Israel plays in providing an identity for certain types of American Jews. Israel, in this novel, neither burnishes nor tarnishes outsiders through its touch, but provides a specific physical setting, whose glow is, in turn, both toxic and lovely.
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By Shoshana Olidort
This compact collection of short stories, almost all of them set in Chicago, is about Jewish men of a certain age who have been playing it safe for all of their mostly passionless though not unsuccessful lives. As doctors, lawyers, academics and businessmen, they live in relative financial stability if not wealth, and have equally stable family situations — their marriages (almost all are married) seem happy, if not exactly passionate.
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By Burt Neuborne
Legal scholars usually tell us that law, especially constitutional law, shapes religion: nurturing its growth under the Free Exercise clause, while inhibiting its power under the Establishment clause. Sally Gordon, Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, turns the accepted wisdom neatly on its head by demonstrating that it is the extraordinary power of the religious impulse that has shaped — and continues to shape — American law, not the other way around.
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In a field as crowded with artistic representations as the Holocaust, it’s easy to assume that there is nothing new to say. Julie Orringer reminds us that there always is, so long as there are individual stories to tell.Read More
By Jay Michaelson
‘I don’t believe in the same God you don’t believe in,” Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the founder of Jewish Renewal, wrote many years ago. Reb Zalman was responding to an imagined atheist, or perhaps an alienated Jew — someone with a spiritual bent but who was unable to accept traditional God-language and beliefs. The implication: that it’s possible to have a meaningful Jewish religious practice without them.
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By Yelena Akhtiorskaya
Hans Keilson was born in Germany in 1909 to a working-class Jewish family and currently lives in Bussum, near Amsterdam, with his wife, a literary historian. His fraught, century-long span has been — at least for English-speakers — only vaguely sketched in (not that there’s been much curiosity). He trained as a physician. When WWII caught him, he fled to the Netherlands and hid, then worked for the Dutch Resistance. His parents died in Auschwitz. After liberation, he became a distinguished psychoanalyst, specializing in the treatment of war trauma in children. And meanwhile, he dabbled in fiction.
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By Dan Friedman
It’s a shame that no one will read this book. Or, rather, it’s an indictment of contemporary reading practices that the scope and flavor of Joshua Cohen’s epic novel “Witz” will escape all but the most passionate or academically driven readers. For a reading audience, think people who are knowledgeable Jews who have read, from beginning to end, “Finnegans Wake.”
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By Mark Oppenheimer
‘The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time,” Judith Shulevitz’s look at the Judeo-Christian practice of setting aside every seventh day for rest, is both an extended exercise in public history and a spiritual autobiography. Discourses about the roots of the Sabbatarian tradition; the various theologies, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish, that recommend it; the representations of it in literature; and the sociological ideas that help explain it are interlaced with personal reflections detailing Shulevitz’s own slow, reluctant history of celebrating the day of rest.
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By Lawrence Grossman
One expects a book called “The Prophet’s Wife” — with a cover illustration of a lush, bucolic biblical setting — to be one more attempt at cashing in on the recent vogue of romantic, sexually suggestive fiction on biblical themes, written by women, and presenting the previously “suppressed” perspective of the female characters. That is, until one notices the name of the author.
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By Ranen Omer-Sherman
Aharon Appelfeld has earned an esteemed, if lonely, reputation for himself as Israel’s writer of the Nazi and pre-Nazi era. This landscape and its immediate aftermath form his near-exclusive literary topography. As a result, he is more often compared to Central European Jewish writers such as Franz Kafka than to Israeli writers of his generation. Within the limitations of this milieu though, he has been astonishingly prolific. His more than 30 works of fiction and nonfiction, including the classic early work “Badenheim 1939” and a late powerful memoir, “The Story of a Life” (2006), have brought him justifiable acclaim for the searing language he uses to explore the effects of absence, silence, and the scars of memory.
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Tracing the Jewish Origins of the Holy Ghost
Forced Out by Nazis, Grandmother Returns With Family to Germany
Mother of Jewish Teen Killed on Brooklyn Bridge Speaks Out
Remembering French-Jewish Writer Viviane Forrester
Google Earth for the 16th Century Mapmaking Set
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