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 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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