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 Negotiating between heroism and collaboration, a kindergarten teacher sought to save lives in the Holocaust
The Nazis Knew My Name By Magda Hellinger with Maya Lee and David Brewster Atria Books, 320 pages, $27 In his 1986 essay collection, “The Drowned and the Saved,” Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor Primo Levi famously discussed a “grey zone” of moral “ambiguity and compromise” during the Holocaust. Among its inhabitants, he suggested, were concentration camp prisoners…
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Culture Before the revolution, a little peace and quiet — now there’s a radical idea
The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas By Gal Beckerman Crown, 331 pages, $28.99 Have social media — especially mega sites such as Facebook and Twitter — played indispensable roles in social change in recent years? Your guess, and mine, would likely be yes. Not so fast, says Gal Beckerman in his…
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Culture In the post-Anthony Weiner and Harvey Weinstein era, a battle against sexual, moral and viral contagions
Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis By Laura Kipnis Pantheon, 210 pages, $26 Enmeshed in a seemingly endless pandemic, we’ve all become amateur epidemiologists, as Laura Kipnis notes, even if we’re not all equally adept at it. In Kipnis’s latest book, she harnesses her caustic prose and scathing wit to another amateur pursuit:…
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Culture Boors, clowns, crazies, weirdos, a pet parakeet — and other hazards of online dating for a mature Jew
Maybe It’s Me: On Being the Wrong Kind of Woman By Eileen Pollack Delphinium, 288 pages, $27 It was the title essay, about Eileen Pollack’s late-life romantic struggles with boorish men, that first drew me to “Maybe It’s Me.” Pollack’s riffs on online dating, admittedly an easy target, are hilarious. And her rueful observations about…
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Culture How forgetting the Holocaust helped Germany thrive after the war
Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-55 By Harald Jähner; translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside Alfred A. Knopf, 394 pages, $30 The original German edition of Harald Jähner’s “Aftermath” was titled, more evocatively, “Wolfszeit,” meaning “time of the wolves.” The expression encapsulates the Hobbesian ferocity of the immediate post-World War…
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Culture Genius, jerk, misogynist, everyman — the many lives of Saul Bellow
Asaf Galay’s documentary “The Adventures of Saul Bellow,” with its play on the title of Bellow’s breakthrough 1953 novel, “The Adventures of Augie March,” adroitly signals its intentions: not just to thumbnail the writer’s picaresque life and literary career, but to seek out correspondences between the two. With Bellow, who died at 89 in 2005,…
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Culture Retire? Pack the court? A Jewish Supreme Court justice’s answers are unconvincing
The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics By Stephen Breyer Harvard University Press, 128 pages, $19.95 Fair or not, the most frequent question U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer gets asked these days is when he plans to retire. “There are many considerations” was his Sphinx-like response in an August interview with…
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Culture How Leonard Bernstein embraced his Jewishness — and changed the world
It is hard to imagine a more charismatic subject than the composer and conductor
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