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 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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Culture In a tale of Holocaust resistance, glimpses of Anne Frank’s last days
Roxane van Iperen’s “The Sisters of Auscwhitz” revives the story of Lien and Janny Brilleslijper
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Culture An All-American journey through Blackness, whiteness, Christianity, Judaism, slavery and freedom
Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multiracial Jewish Family By Laura Arnold Leibman Oxford University Press, 320 pages, $27.95 Race has always been an important category in American life. But its contours have never been fixed. Laws denoting who should be classified as white — or Black — have varied from state…
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Culture In World War II Berlin, a little-known story of German resistance
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler By Rebecca Donner Little, Brown and Company, 576 pages, $32 Since childhood, Rebecca Donner had known that she was heir to an important – and little-known — story of World War II…
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Culture How a Jewish spy infiltrated the U.S. atomic program — and helped the Soviet Union build the bomb
Sleeper Agent: The Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away By Ann Hagedorn Simon & Schuster, 272 pages, $28 Was the Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s nothing but political hysteria? For all its deleterious effects on free speech rights, reputations, and careers, it seems not. Cold War fears of the domestic threat…
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Culture Ravaged by Alzheimer’s, a star professor tries to remember how to love
Morningside Heights By Joshua Henkin Pantheon Books, 304 pages, $26.95 One of the terrors of aging is the prospect of Alzheimer’s disease. An even worse scourge, though, is the variant of the disease that afflicts the merely middle-aged – the brutal early-onset Alzheimer’s so memorably embodied by Oscar winner Julianne Moore in the 2014 film…
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