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 Did Dismantling of States Make the Worst of the Holocaust a Reality?
Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning By Timothy Snyder Tim Duggan Books, 462 pages, $30 In two generations, we have witnessed a massive shift in our attitude toward the Holocaust: from regarding it as incomprehensible, defying human understanding, to trying to construct rigorous, often competing historical explanations for its causes and contours. There…
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Culture 12 Can’t-Miss Books for Fall
The tangled relationship between history and myth is one theme that emerges from our idiosyncratic and speculative preview of fall books. It should be fascinating, for example, to compare French Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano’s novelistic deconstruction of the French Resistance with Robert Gildea’s revisionist historical overview of the same subject, “Fighters in the Shadows.” Geraldine…
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Culture The Progress of Poet Maxine Kumin
The Pawnbroker’s Daughter: A Memoir By Maxine Kumin W.W. Norton & Company, 176 pages, $25.95 In her poem “Sonnets Uncorseted,” Maxine Kumin bemoans the sexist attitudes that constrained 20th-century American women poets. Immersed in motherhood and domesticity, she confesses to having been “Terrified of writing domestic poems,/… anathema to the prevailing clique of male pooh-bahs[.]”…
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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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Yiddish פֿילאַנטראָפּ אלי הירשפֿעלד שענקט פֿאָרווערטס די אינטערנעץ־אַדרעסן Yiddish.com און Yiddish.orgPhilanthropist Eli Hirschfeld donates domains Yiddish.com and Yiddish.org to the Forward
די מתּנה וועט דערמעגלעכן מער אָנהענגערס פֿון ייִדיש צו געפֿינען די ייִדישע ווידעאָס, אַרטיקלען און שפּילן פֿונעם פֿאָרווערטס.
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