David L. Ulin
By David L. Ulin
-
Culture After The Revolution, Joshua Furst Finds The Cost Of Freedom
REVOLUTIONARIES: A NOVEL By Joshua Furst Alfred A. Knopf: 352 pages, $26.95 It’s hard to write historical fiction about recent history. That’s because history itself is, or has become, its own kind of fiction, told and retold, preserved in sound and image, as if these were windows we might open and climb through. Want to…
-
Culture Nothing Succeeds Like Gary Shteyngart’s ‘Success’
Lake Success: A Novel Gary Shteyngart Random House, 352 pages, $28 Barry Cohen is a hero for our time. The protagonist of Gary Shteyngart’s fourth novel, “Lake Success,” he is master of the universe, or at least of Wall Street, although really, he is waiting for the other shoe to drop. It is 2016, and…
-
Film & TV Why A Jewish Filmmaker Took On A Muslim Girl’s Story For PBS
At the very end of “Dalya’s Other Country,” a young woman named Dalya — the documentary’s namesake — attends the January protests at Los Angeles International Airport against the president’s first travel ban. Accompanied by her two brothers and wearing a hijab, she carries a piece of poster board on which she has written in…
-
49 Reasons Why 2016 Wasn't as Bad as You Think Jenny Diski’s ‘In Gratitude’
Jenny Diski’s “In Gratitude” resonates as sharply as a slap to the face: Wake up, the book demands. Inspired by the author’s diagnosis of terminal cancer in 2014 (she died in April of this year), it tells a pair of interwoven stories: first, that of Diski’s dying, and then the saga of her teenage years,…
-
Culture Cynthia Ozick Has Issues — And Come To Think of It, So Do We
CRITICS, MONSTERS, FANATICS, AND OTHER LITERARY ESSAYS By Cynthia Ozick Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 224 pages, $25 It’s a little tricky, perhaps, to complain about Cynthia Ozick’s take on book reviewers in “Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays” when I made my living for many years reviewing books. How can I play anything other than…
Most Popular
- 1
News DNA test kits spark a surge of online conversions to Judaism in the U.S.
- 2
Culture She was a dancer who leapt to the top of her field — then the Trump administration fired her
- 3
Culture RFK Jr.’s poems to Olivia Nuzzi are peak cringe — so were King Solomon’s
- 4
Fast Forward Cory Booker has long embraced Jewish tradition. Now he has married a Jewish woman.
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Trump’s new White House ballroom architect is a Jewish immigrant who has advocated for refugees
-
Art It’s time to reconsider what we know about Jewish birthing rituals
-
Looking Forward My favorite Christmas scene in literature — and why it makes me feel so Jewish
-
Opinion Americans are waking up to right-wing antisemitism. We’re still ignoring the root problem
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism