Laura Hodes writes about the arts frequently for the Forward and other publications.
Laura Hodes
By Laura Hodes
-
Culture Laughing in the Face of Evil
Joseph Skibell’s third novel “A Curable Romantic” evokes the spirit of “Candide” with a Jewish postmodern twist in order to ask the same question as Voltaire: How can we be optimistic in the face of evil? Voltaire wrote “Candide” to revolt against Gottfried Leibniz’s philosophy of optimism after experiencing the suffering of the Seven Years’…
-
Culture Of Schmucks and Schlemiels
Paramount Pictures’ new laugh-out-loud comedy “Dinner for Schmucks” is only the latest in a crop of recent films and novels to idealize not the schmuck, but the schlemiel. Directed by Jay Roach and executive produced by Sacha Baron Cohen — no stranger to the appeal of the schlemiel — “Dinner for Schmucks” is a remake…
-
Culture Caught Between Burlesque and Belief
Peep Show By Joshua Braff Algonquin Books, 272 pages, $13.95 After Joshua Braff’s excellent but largely unheralded “The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green,” his second novel is another coming-of-age story set in the mid-1970s. In “Peep Show,” though, the protagonist, David, and his sister are trapped by divorcing parents between two closed Jewish worlds of…
-
Books Immortal Bloodsucking Opportunists
Angel Time: The Songs of the Seraphim By Anne Rice Knopf, 268 pages, $25.95. Anne Rice declared in 2005 in the Author’s Note to her novel “Christ the Lord” that her return to Catholicism meant she would no longer “write anything that wasn’t for Christ.” She professed no more vampires, since they reflected a “world…
-
Culture Furious Responsibilities
The Kindly Ones By Jonathan Littell, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell *HarperCollins, 992 pages, $29.99. * *‘But you should be able to admit to yourselves that you might also have done what I did….. If you were born in a country or at a time not only when nobody comes to kill your…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
News Jews paused Indiana’s abortion ban — by turning a religious freedom law against the evangelical right
- 2
Culture In 1989, Harold Pinter and Jerry Schatzberg made the perfect Holocaust movie for 2026
- 3
Opinion An abominable new Israeli law is a death warrant for democracy
- 4
Culture Inside the ancient Christian theology driving modern antisemitism
In Case You Missed It
-
News Israel antiwar protests spur intensifying government crackdown
-
Film & TV This Christian conversion comedy should have left Jews out of it
-
Fast Forward Jewish families and a rabbi ask to join lawsuit to block Oklahoma Jewish charter school
-
Fast Forward Sponsors back out of festival that invited Kanye West to headline despite record of antisemitism
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
