By Joshua Cohen
Literary criticism is literature that discusses other literature, situating whatever book or poem historically, while at the same time, relating the literary work to the extraliterary: to the other arts, or to the world in general. Book reviewing is much the same as criticism except shorter, and the function it serves is often as much literary as one of consumer guidance: I give Kerouac three stars, or four, or three-and-a-half; William Burroughs’s new novel about nude dining gets two thumbs up, “a must-read.”
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By Amy Klein
When Omar Yussef arrives in Little Palestine – the Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, neighborhood populated by Palestinian-Americans — the aging schoolteacher first finds a headless dead body in his son’s apartment, then watches his son get arrested by an overzealous Palestinian-American policeman, all the while dealing with internecine Arab politics at the United Nations, where he is supposed to speak when the Palestinian president arrives.
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By Keith Kahn-Harris
A monumental study of English antisemitism proves an astonishing and controversial achievement.Read More
By Shoshana Olidort
He is the anti-hero of the American Jewish novel: bright, only not bright enough; more dreamy than driven, and possessed by insatiable, often misappropriated desires. He does not see himself as beholden to his Jewishness, but neither can he escape it. He was Portnoy and Herzog and the male characters in Leonard Michaels’s fiction. In this latest incarnation he is an everyman named Milo Burke, the hero of Sam Lipsyte’s new novel, “The Ask,” a dark comedy about life in 21st-century America.Read More
By Matthew Rovner
Arch Oboler’s “This Precious Freedom” (1942) is the first film ever made about a Nazi takeover of the United States. It was suppressed by its producer, an automaking company better known today for financial than moral bankruptcy: General Motors Corp.
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By Steven G. Kellman
Imminence of the end concentrates the craft. German critics employ the term Altersstill — late style — to designate the tendency of such aging masters as Poussin, Beethoven and Beckett to focus their energies on essentials. Once the enfant terrible of American Jewish literature, Philip Roth (Long may he live!) is now 76, and in “Everyman” (2006), “Exit Ghost” (2007) and “Indignation” (2008), the virtuoso of boisterous provocations has taken on the urgent task of confronting mortality. “The Humbling” extends that project.
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By Ilan Stavans
‘Mexicans are the scum of the earth,” a student of mine said after being asked to describe the status of the immigrants at her South Carolina high school.
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By Jessica Siegel
Though he still maintains his accent and caffeinated New York pulse, Richard Zimler is far better known in Portugal, Turkey, Brazil, France and England than in the United States. He may be the world’s most famous unknown living American Jewish writer.
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By Joshua Cohen
‘Chronic City” initially seemed an important and pleasurable novel to review, just as it must have initially seemed, to Jonathan Lethem, an important and pleasurable novel to write. The ideal reviewer, as if a character in science fiction, relives the writer’s experience word by word, sentence by sentence. The reviewer becomes, in a sense, the author’s projection or double, questioning choices of plot, wording and punctuation, and revising paragraphs and pages, until what results is an alternate book: Like it or not, you’re reading my own version of “Chronic City” now. (This is apropos of nothing much. But it seemed important and pleasurable enough at the beginning.)
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By Laura Hodes
Anne Rice declared in 2005 in the Author’s Note to her novel “Christ the Lord” that her return to Catholicism meant she would no longer “write anything that wasn’t for Christ.” She professed no more vampires, since they reflected a “world that didn’t include redemption.” In her new novel, “Angel Time: The Songs of the Seraphim,” then, Rice creates a new hero, one who seeks redemption with the divine aid of an angel and explores another idea from that same Author’s Note: that the sheer miraculousness of Jewish survival is proof to her of God.
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When Hank Greenberg Met Jackie Robinson
Reconsider Decision on Rabbis and Intermarriage
Ultra-Orthodox Men Ditch All-Black Attire as Fashion Trumps Tradition
Israel's Shas, Right-Wing Kingmaker Party, Takes Sharp Turn to Left
Is Steven Hawking’s Decision To Boycott an Israeli Conference Boon to BDS?
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