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 How The Ritchie Boys Helped Win World War II For America
Sons and Soldiers: The Untold Story of the Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned with the U.S. Army to Fight Hitler By Bruce Henderson William Morrow, 448 pages, $28.99 As the Nazi noose pulled ever tighter in Germany, many Jewish families prioritized sending their eldest sons to freedom. A few years later, some of…
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Culture Love In The Time Of Scholarship, Courtesy of Rachel Kadish
The Weight of Ink By Rachel Kadish Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 592 pages, $28 By now, it’s a familiar trope: stories set in the past and the present, at once parallel and intersecting, linked by writing that survives through the centuries. The many forerunners of Rachel Kadish’s new historical fiction, “The Weight of Ink,” include Tom…
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Culture Can You Sing A Novel To The Tune Of ‘Fiddler On The Roof’?
After Anatevka: A Novel Inspired by “Fiddler on the Roof” By Alexandra Silber Pegasus Books, 336 pages, $25.95 “Fiddler on the Roof” ends with the dairyman Tevye and most of his family evicted from their shtetl of Anatevka and heading to new lives in America. In their musical adaptation of Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish-language tales, Joseph…
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Art How Jewish Athletes Defied Stereotypes Throughout History
Never Walk Alone: Jewish Identities in Sport At the Munich Jewish Museum Through January 7, 2018 The 1936 Berlin Olympics showcased the Nazi love of spectacle and buttressed the regime’s international legitimacy. To avert boycott threats, the government temporarily muted overt manifestations of its anti-Semitic policies, removing discriminatory signage and toning down newspaper rhetoric. But…
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Art How Henryk Ross’s Amazing Photos Unearthed The History Of Lodz — And Mine As Well
Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross At the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through July 30 The story of the Lodz Ghetto has become folkloric. Chronicled in novels such as Leslie Epstein’s “King of the Jews” and Steve Sem-Sandberg’s “The Emperor of Lies,” this was the place that the dictatorial Mordechai Chaim…
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Culture New German Monument Honors Gays And Lesbians Persecuted By Nazis
On June 27, the city of Munich unveiled its “Monument to the Gays and Lesbians Persecuted under the Nazi Regime.” The sidewalk memorial, commissioned by the city in 2011 and created by the German artist Ulla von Brandenburg, is a mosaic of colored concrete blocks that marks the site of a gay bar raided by…
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Culture One Author, Two Radically Different Holocaust Stories
Hell’s Traces: One Murder, Two Families, Thirty-Five Holocaust Memorials By Victor Ripp Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 224 pages, $25 By Julia M. Klein Victor Ripp, an American academic and author, is the descendant of two European Jewish families that met radically different fates. On his mother’s side, the Kahans, a wealthy clan skilled at the…
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Culture Facing Euthanasia, A WWII Survivor Relives Her Dramatic Life
The Longest Night By Otto de Kat Translated by Laura Watkinson MacLehose Press, 168 pages, $22.99 Emma, the sympathetic protagonist of Otto de Kat’s “The Longest Night,” is 96 and ready to say goodbye to her life. But first she will relive it, re-experiencing her emotions, debating her choices. A nurse is at her side,…
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