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 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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Books 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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Food Israeli Chef Dishes on Her New Berlin Hot Spot
Chef Haya Molcho of NENI. Photographs courtesy of NENI With 20,000 Israeli immigrants, Berlin now hosts delicatessens and hummus cafes, as well as the more upscale, French-influenced fare of Mani Restaurant. The latest Israeli culinary sensation is NENI Berlin, a casually eclectic place with an open kitchen, luxuriant plant décor and panoramic views of the…
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Culture Maybe Eichmann Wasn’t So Banal
● Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer By Bettina Stangneth, Translated from German by Ruth Martin Alfred A. Knopf, 608 pages, $35 It seems a stretch to think of Adolf Eichmann as having had an “unexamined life.” Since his 1960 trial in Israel, and Hannah Arendt’s controversial 1963 account, “Eichmann in…
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