Julia M. Klein, the Forward’s contributing book critic, has been a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Follow her @JuliaMKlein and @juliamklein.bsky.social
Julia M. KleinContributing Book Critic
By Julia M. Klein
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Culture From Poland To The USSR To Iran To Israel: A Holocaust Story
Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey By Mikhal Dekel W.W. Norton & Company, 417 pages, $27.95 It was the prompting of an Iranian-American colleague at the City College of New York that stirred Mikhal Dekel’s interest in her family’s Holocaust narrative of flight, hardship and survival. Dekel’s initial idea was to collaborate on a book…
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Culture Pregnant At 57, A Woman Finds Tragedy And Reconciliation
On Division: A Novel By Goldie Goldbloom Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 271 pages; $26 The world conjured by Goldie Goldbloom’s “On Division” lies somewhere between realism and magical realism, at once vaguely possible and highly improbable. That liminal space seems just right for this elegant novel about a Hasidic woman cocooned by her close-knit faith…
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Culture How They Brought Down Harvey Weinstein And Jump-Started #MeToo
She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement By Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey Penguin Press, $28, 310 pages In “She Said,” New York Times investigative reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey raise the thorny question of whether the #MeToo movement has gone too far — or not far enough. Then…
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Culture The Blood Libel Accusation That Inflamed America
The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town By Edward Berenson W.W. Norton & Company, 271 pages, $26.95 On September 22, 1928, a four-year-old girl, Barbara Griffiths, got lost in the woods around Massena, a small town in upstate New York. Hundreds of townspeople joined in the search. Hours later, someone (to this day, no…
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Culture George Gershwin’s Mercilessly Short Summertime
Summertime: George Gershwin’s Life in Music By Richard Crawford W.W. Norton & Company, $39.95, 592 pages It’s hard to read a biography of George Gershwin, who died at 38, without feeling a sense of loss. But rather than bemoan the composer’s premature passing, Richard Crawford, a musicologist and professor emeritus at the University of Michigan,…
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Culture In A Forged Van Gogh, A Real Story Of Lives Uprooted By Nazis
In the Full Light of the Sun By Clare Clark Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 424 pages, $27 “Fiction, unlike the truth, cannot defy belief,” Clare Clark writes in an author’s note appended to her latest novel. That hardly unassailable dictum defines her buffet approach to mining history. “In the Full Light of the Sun” is loosely…
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Culture How The War Against Sexual Harassment Was Won
Reckoning: The Epic Battle Against Sexual Abuse and Harassment By Linda Hirshman Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 316 pages, $27 It’s hard to write history while it’s happening. One pitfall is the problem of assessing just how powerful a movement or trend really is. To wit: Is the current #MeToo furor the harbinger of a social revolution?…
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Culture His Father, The Communist
A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father By David Maraniss Simon & Schuster, 416 pages, $28 As a biographer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Maraniss has trained his eye on U.S. presidents (Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) and sports icons (Roberto Clemente and Vince Lombardi). In “A Good American Family,” he burrows…
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