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 and @juliamklein.bsky.social
Julia M. KleinContributing Book Critic
By Julia M. Klein
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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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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…
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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,…
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Culture Deep in the woods, where a terrifying real-life Holocaust fairy tale unfolded
Into the Forest: A Holocaust Story of Survival, Triumph, and Love By Rebecca Frankel St. Martin’s Press, 352 pages, $28.99 In fairy tales, the woods are a place of enchantment, a dark realm whose surprises can quickly turn sinister. For the embattled Jews of Poland, fleeing Nazi genocide, they were a refuge that was also…
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