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 Archive Thief Saved History — Then Stole It
The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust By Lisa Moses Leff, Oxford University Press, 304 pages, $29.95 Seven decades on, we are still taking stock of the ancillary losses that were part of the Holocaust: the appropriated homes and businesses, the scattered possessions, the purloined artworks…
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Culture How 9 Objects Tell Story of Early Jewish Philadelphia
Against the backdrop of the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, the National Museum of American Jewish History describes the Jewish immigrant experience: the lure of freedom and economic opportunity, struggles against poverty and prejudice, the balancing act between tradition and assimilation. Here are men and women who took risks, made discoveries, survived hardships and pioneered…
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Culture Anatomy of the Murderers
● The Third Reich in History and Memory By Richard J. Evans Oxford University Press, 496 pages, $29.95 However deranged his deeds, Adolf Hitler was not certifiably mad. The German people did not voluntarily embrace the dictator, but acquiesced in his rule only after a campaign of terror that silenced or sidelined the political opposition….
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Culture Some of Abe Lincoln’s Best Friends Were Jewish. Honestly.
● Lincoln and the Jews: A History By Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell Thomas Dunne Books, 288 pages, $40 As far as we know, Abraham Lincoln never said, “Some of my best friends are Jewish.” But he certainly could have. Lincoln did chide his anti-Semitic Civil War generals and others who expressed the prejudices…
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Culture Granddaughters of the Shoah
Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind By Sarah Wildman Riverhead Books, 400 pages, $27.95 A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France By Miranda Richmond Mouillot Crown, 288 pages, $26 The latest Holocaust memoirs are by people who weren’t there, who are linked to the tragedy by the…
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Culture 12 Books We’re Looking Forward To in 2015
In 2015, Jewish stories will come in diverse guises — from flights of magical realism to groundbreaking history and biography. Assimilation and tradition assert their warring claims. While memoirist Judy Brown chronicles her escape from a suffocating religious upbringing, Bosnian immigrant and literary prodigy Aleksandar Hemon continues his embrace of Jewish characters and themes. Anniversaries…
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Culture How Modernist Artists Survived (and Sometimes Thrived) Under Nazis
● Artists under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany By Jonathan Petropoulos Yale University Press, 424 pages, $40 Nearly 70 years after the end of World War II, newly available archives and probing scholarship are sharpening our perspective on daily life, culture, political infighting, and collaboration and resistance in the Third Reich. Jonathan Petropoulos’s…
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Culture Physicists of Two Masters
● Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler By Philip Ball University of Chicago Press, 320 pages, $30 In his 1998 play “Copenhagen,” Michael Frayn used the Heisenberg uncertainty principle — a cornerstone of modern physics — as a metaphor for the impossibility of pinning down historical facts when memories…
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