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 100 Years Ago, Immigration Policy Was Just As Crucial — And Controversial
Two contrasting images in “1917: How One Year Changed The World,” at Philadelphia’s National Museum of American Jewish History, demonstrate the volatility of American attitudes toward immigrants.A World War I poster cautioning against food waste is also a hopeful narrative of arrival and assimilation. A cluster of immigrants gaze from a ship toward the Statue…
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Culture Brick By Brick, Architect Louis Kahn Gets The Biography He Deserves
You Say To Brick: The Life Of Louis Kahn By Wendy Lesser Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 416 pages, $30 The Estonian-born, Philadelphia-based architect Louis I. Kahn (1901–1974) remains a strong presence in his adopted city. Near his Washington Square West home, a pocket park bears his name. Residents still point out the Walnut Street office…
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Culture Why It’s Critical That We Demythologize The Holocaust
Why? Explaining the Holocaust By Peter Hayes W.W. Norton & Company, 412 pages, $27.95 The historian Peter Hayes has always derided what he regards as simplistic explanations of complicated phenomena. In his popular Holocaust lecture course at Northwestern University, he savaged Daniel Goldhagen’s argument, in “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” that a uniquely German “eliminationist anti-Semitism” caused…
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Culture In France, a Vexing Dilemma: Collaborate or Resist?
Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved, and Died under Nazi Occupation By Anne Sebba St. Martin’s Press, 457 pages, $27.99 The perspective of time and new primary sources are chipping away at myths about resistance and collaboration under Nazi rule. Last year, for instance, the French response to defeat and occupation was…
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Culture A Gorgeous Memoir of a Personal Hell
Nobody’s Son: A Memoir By Mark Slouka W.W. Norton & Company, 278 pages, $26.95 For the epigraph of his gorgeous, devastating memoir, Mark Slouka turns to the pre-eminent poet of hell, Dante: “Each one wraps himself in what burns him.” The quotation, it becomes clear, applies to Slouka, his mother and — above all —…
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Culture The Unlikely Story of Nachman Libeskind’s Survival
In the Unlikeliest of Places: How Nachman Libeskind Survived the Nazis, Gulags and Soviet Communism By Annette Libeskind Berkovits, foreword by Daniel Libeskind Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 296 pages, $34.99 The name Libeskind most likely conjures Daniel Libeskind, architect of the Jewish Museum Berlin and master planner of the World Trade Center site. “In the…
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Culture How The Sharps Defied the Nazis and Became American Heroes
Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War By Artemis Joukowsky III, foreword by Ken Burns Beacon Press, 272 pages, $25.95 Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War A film by Ken Burns and Artemis Joukowsky Premiering 9 p.m., September 20, on PBS In some respects, Waitstill and Martha Sharp resembled other Holocaust rescuers: They were motivated by…
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Culture America’s Cosmetic Titans Go Head-To-Head In ‘War Paint’
For decades, the two great 20th-century titans of cosmetics, Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein, feuded, competing for beauty hegemony and celebrity, expressing mutual disdain, and purloining each other’s ideas and employees. At one point, Rubinstein even hired Arden’s ex-husband Tommy Lewis, both a charming philanderer and a gifted salesman. But what if, for all their…
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