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 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:…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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
-
Culture After America’s deadliest antisemitic incident, grief, trauma and resilience
Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood By Mark Oppenheimer Knopf, 320 pages, $28.95 After each mass shooting, once the political posturing subsides and the press spotlight moves on, the affected families and communities tend to fade from public consciousness. But what happens to them next? “When the…
-
Culture Was her parents’ tempestuous marriage part of an elaborate cover story? She may never know for sure.
Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets By Judy Bolton-Fasman Mandel Vilar Press, 248 pages, $24.95 The most frustrating moment in Judy Bolton-Fasman’s beautifully-written family memoir, “Asylum,” comes in the prologue, titled “Burn This.” Her father has mailed her an envelope filled with what she imagines to be his long-held secrets. Before she opens it, though,…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
News Trump antisemitism executive order invokes anti-KKK law and targets ‘leftist, anti-American’ universities
- 2
Fast Forward UFC fighter says Hitler was a ‘good guy’ and the ‘Holocaust ain’t real’
- 3
Fast Forward For top State Dept. post, Trump taps staffer fired for attending white nationalist conference
- 4
Opinion Yarden Bibas is freed, but his family’s suffering continues. It should enrage us all
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Israelis respond to Trump’s Gaza takeover with shock, dismay, elation and dark humor
-
Fast Forward American Jewish leaders grieve as Hamas terrorists convicted of murdering their friends go free
-
Opinion My Jewish family was forced out of our homeland. We must not let Gazans suffer the same fate.
-
Film & TV How the master builder behind ‘The Brutalist’ was inspired by her hometown synagogue
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
