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 Helen Gurley Brown Turned Herself Into a Cultural Icon
Not Pretty Enough: The Unlikely Triumph of Helen Gurley Brown By Gerri Hirshey Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 528 pages, $27 She told one girlfriend that she had slept with 178 men before her marriage. Even afterward, she never stopped having discreet affairs, using another friend’s apartment for assignations. Raised in poverty and insecure…
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Culture The Time When Hitler Blinked
Hitler’s Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany By Nathan Stoltzfus Yale University Press, 432 pages, $40 In late February and early March 1943, “Aryan” spouses in mixed marriages, primarily women, gathered in Berlin’s Rosenstrasse to demand the release of their Jewish husbands from detention. After threatening to shoot the protesters, the Third Reich unexpectedly…
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Culture How Many Neighbors Were Complicit in the Holocaust?
Facing deportation to Auschwitz, 13-year-old Steven Fenves watched as neighbors in Hungarian-occupied Yugoslavia lined the stairs, “waiting to ransack whatever we left behind, cursing at us, yelling at us, spitting at us as we left.” Choking up, he also recalled in an oral history that the family’s cook rushed into the apartment to salvage artwork…
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Culture For Diane Arbus, Photography Was Like Sexual Conquest
Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer By Arthur Lubow Ecco, 752 pages, $35 Arthur Lubow writes that he has tried to tell the story of the photographer Diane Arbus with “the detail and clarity that she prized.” The portrait that emerges in “Diane Arbus,” the first major biography since Patricia Bosworth’s in 1984 is of…
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Culture In the Ghettos of Poland, Few Heroes and Many Witnesses
In Those Nightmarish Days: The Ghetto Reportage of Peretz Opoczynski and Josef Zelkowicz Edited and with an introduction by Samuel D. Kassow; translated and co-edited by David Suchoff Yale University Press (New Yiddish Library), 309 pages, $35 The people perished, but the writings survived. Several of the East European Jewish ghettos forced into existence and…
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Culture They Hunted Nazis to the Ends of the Earth
The Nazi Hunters By Andrew Nagorski Simon & Schuster, 416 pages, $30 There is a Zelig-like quality to Andrew Nagorski’s “The Nazi Hunters.” More often than not, in a saga spanning decades and continents, Nagorski has been there, interviewing the men and women pursuing the worst villains of the Holocaust. Many of the stories he…
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Culture Chanan Tigay’s Mad Search for the World’s Oldest Bible
The Lost Book of Moses: The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Bible By Chanan Tigay Ecco, 368 pages, $27.99 Before Bedouins discovered the first Dead Sea Scrolls, in 1947 in a cave near the Dead Sea, another ancient manuscript briefly enraptured the archaeological community and promised to transform biblical scholarship. The find in question was…
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Culture The Enduring Mysteries of Raoul Wallenberg
Raoul Wallenberg: The Heroic Life and Mysterious Disappearance of the Man Who Saved Thousands of Hungarian Jews From the Holocaust By Ingrid Carlberg, with an introduction by Kofi Annan; translated by Ebba Segerberg MacLehose Press, 639 pages, $29.99 He was the multilingual scion of a powerful Swedish banking family, a gifted artist and architect, a…
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