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 Diary of Girl’s Time in Concentration Camps Invites Comparisons to Anne Frank
● Helga’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Account of Life in a Concentration Camp By Helga Weiss, translated by Neil Bermel W.W. Norton, 240 pages, $24.95 Seven decades after the Holocaust, survivor stories are still trickling out, adding nuance to a familiar and gruesome narrative. It is sometimes hard for these latecomers to get the attention…
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Culture Thriller Writer Janice Steinberg Preaches Gospel of Second Chances
● The Tin Horse By Janice Steinberg Random House, 352 pages, $26 At 85, Elaine Greenstein Resnick, “a brisk, no-bullshit woman” who worked as a civil rights attorney, is downsizing as she prepares to enter a retirement community. The University of Southern California, which wants her papers, has provided an eager young archivist to help…
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Culture Shining Light on American Complicity In Harboring Nazis
● Useful Enemies: John Demjanjuk and America’s Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals By Richard Rashke Delphinium Books, 622 pages, $29.95 There is horror to spare in Richard Rashke’s “Useful Enemies: John Demjanjuk and America’s Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals,” an engrossing cri de coeur about our country’s skewed post-World War II priorities. The…
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Culture Finding Tale of Redemption at Auschwitz
● The Thief of Auschwitz By Jon Clinch CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 276 pages, $16 ‘The Thief of Auschwitz” stole my sleep. Jon Clinch’s latest novel, which he has chosen to self-publish, is a page-turner with style. It’s a simpler, quicker read than “Finn,” his impressive first novel, which brilliantly imagined the backstory of Huckleberry…
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Culture Feminism Is Easy, Comedy Is Hard
We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy By Yael Kohen Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux 336 pages, $27 In the early 1980s, while I was reporting a story on female stand-ups for Ms. magazine, Adrianne Tolsch, the host at New York City’s Catch a Rising Star, agreed to arrange a special night…
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Culture ‘Stars of David’ Becomes a Musical
When Abigail Pogrebin decided she wanted to interview Jewish celebrities about their Jewish identity, even her husband was skeptical. “I think it’s a great idea, but why would anyone talk to you?” he told her. “I basically dove in with a prayer,” said Pogrebin, a Manhattan-based journalist and former television producer. She began with her…
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Culture The Streisand Has Two Faces
Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand By William J. Mann Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 567 pages, $30 It was hardly an accident that 22-year-old Barbra Streisand seemed to embody the comedian Fanny Brice so perfectly in the 1964 Broadway musical “Funny Girl.” According to celebrity biographer William J. Mann, the role was deliberately tailored to fit her…
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The Schmooze Polish Play Teaches Hard Lessons of the Holocaust
In the exemplary Wilma Theater production (and U.S. premiere) of Tadeusz Slobodzianek’s “Our Class,” a scrim-veiled, eerily illuminated representation of a barn does triple duty. It serves, first of all, as the stage version of the barn where, in 1941, as many as 1,600 Jewish residents of the town of Jedwabne were herded and then…
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