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
-
Culture How We Tell Holocaust Stories Without Survivors
We’ve reached a pivotal cultural moment in Holocaust historiography and memoir, poised between the final thoughts of the last survivors and the attempts of their children — and, more recently, their grandchildren — to make sense of their legacy. It’s a phenomenon with an equivalent in Germany, where the so-called Third Generation has been reckoning…
-
Culture Geraldine Brooks Reimagines King David — for Better and Worse
The Secret Chord By Geraldine Brooks Viking, 320 pages, $27.95 Musician and warrior, shepherd and poet, anointed of God and guilt-ridden sinner, the biblical King David is a compelling and contradictory figure. In her latest work of historical fiction, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks (“March,” “People of the Book,” “Caleb’s Crossing”) heightens those contradictions,…
-
Culture A Distinguished History in Art Theft
Hitler’s Art Thief: Hildebrand Gurlitt, the Nazis, and the Looting of Europe’s Treasures By Susan Ronald St. Martin’s Press, 400 pages, $27.99 In 2012, German investigators broke into the apartment of the Munich recluse Cornelius Gurlitt and confiscated nearly 1,300 pieces of modern art, much of it of murky or suspicious provenance. Gurlitt had inherited…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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[.]”…
-
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…
-
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…
Explore
Most Popular
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion It’s time for the pro-Palestinian movement to make a radical change
-
Fast Forward NY State Young Republicans chapter disbanded amid racist, antisemitic chat scandal
-
Fast Forward Palestinian man who allegedly participated in Oct. 7 attack on Israel arrested in Louisiana
-
Fast Forward Far-right UK activist Tommy Robinson visits Israel on invite of Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
