Julia M. Klein, the Forward’s contributing book critic, has been a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Follow her @JuliaMKlein.
Julia M. KleinContributing Book Critic
By Julia M. Klein
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Culture The Life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg — Strictly Scrutinized
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life By Jane Sherron De Hart Alfred A. Knopf, 752 pages, $35 Among the virtues of Jane Sherron De Hart’s magisterial and timely biography of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is that it prompts reflection on what it takes — for a woman in particular — to reach the…
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Culture Has Haruki Murakami Written His First Jewish Novel? Kind Of.
Killing Commendatore By Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen Alfred A. Knopf, 704 pages, $30 Around the time of the Anschluss, the 1938 Nazi takeover of Austria, a famous Japanese painter living in Vienna is entangled in an abortive assassination plot. His girlfriend, a resistance member, is captured, tortured and killed by…
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Culture From Phyllis Chesler, A Politically Incorrect Memoir Laden With Gossip And TMI
A Politically Incorrect Feminist: Creating a Movement With Bitches, Lunatics, Dykes, Prodigies, Warriors, and Wonder Women By Phyllis Chesler St. Martin’s Press, 320 pages, $27.99 Women of a certain age will remember Phyllis Chesler’s landmark book, “Women and Madness.” Her 1972 examination of how psychiatry failed women has never been out of print, as she…
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Culture Another Hidden Jewish Girl — But Not Anne Frank
The Cut Out Girl: A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found By Bart van Es Penguin Press, 304 pages, $28 It’s impossible to think of the Holocaust in the Netherlands without conjuring the ghost of Anne Frank. And though Frank and her diary were exceptional, her story embodies the opposing fates of Dutch…
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Culture In Vichy France, The Nazi Era Viewed Up Close
Deposition 1940-1944: A Secret Diary of Life in Vichy France By Léon Werth; edited and translated by David Ball Oxford University Press, 368 pages, $34.95 The French Jewish novelist and essayist Léon Werth spent World War II, buffeted by history but shielded from its worst consequences, chronicling the passivity, inertia and gradual political awakening of…
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Culture For These Doomed Passengers, There Was No Refuge in Cuba
The German Girl By Armando Lucas Correa, translated by Nick Caistor Atria Books/Simon & Schuster, 368 pages, $26.99 The drama of the St. Louis, the ship that once promised last-minute rescue for hundreds of German Jewish refugees, is compelling enough without fictional embellishment. In 1939, the trans-Atlantic liner voyaged from Hamburg, Germany, to an abruptly…
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Film & TV Why Hollywood Used To Be Better For Women
Nobody’s Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood By J. E. Smyth Oxford University Press, 328 pages, $29.95 Just the Funny Parts: … And a Few Hard Truths About Sneaking Into the Hollywood Boys’ Club By Nell Scovell Dey Street Books, 336 pages, $27.99 It’s even worse than you suspected. But it was once better…
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Culture Before Sondheim And Miranda, There Was Rodgers And Hammerstein
Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution By Todd S. Purdum Henry Holt & Co., 400 pages, $32 Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II met cute at Columbia University’s Varsity Show. Hammerstein had helped write the musical variety show. Rodgers’s elder brother, Morty Rodgers, a fraternity pal of Hammerstein’s, introduced the two afterward. Rodgers, not…
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