Steven G. Kellman
By Steven G. Kellman
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Culture How an Orthodox Jew became the great defender of books and bookstores
In Praise of Good Bookstores By Jeff Deutsch Princeton University Press, 216 pp, $19.95 My university’s library recently announced that, in order to make space for lounges and meeting rooms, it was putting about a third of its collection into storage. But not to worry: Readers need only submit a request, and a book will…
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Culture What happens when a New York kvetcher meets modern-day kitsch?
It is hard to imagine Rabbi Akiva eating lime Jell-O, Maimonides living in a trailer park, or Martin Buber twirling a baton. These are all, according to the famous mid-century comedian Lenny Bruce, quintessentially goyish activities. I.B. Singer is more likely to have slathered his cream cheese on pumpernickel than white bread. Bruce defined Jewishness…
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Culture Narrowly escaping the Nazis, a wandering Jewish book improbably survives to tell its own tale
The Pages By Hugo Hamilton Alfred A. Knopf, 272 pp, $28 Rebellion By Joseph Roth Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann Everyman’s Library, 168 pp, $24 May 10, 1933, was Kristallnacht for printed books, a day on which gleeful mobs tossed millions of volumes into bonfires in cities throughout Germany. Among the 30,000 titles…
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Culture In the Warsaw Ghetto, where an Indian play imagined the worst that was yet to come
A Play for the End of the World By Jai Chakrabarti Knopf, 304 pp, $27 In a woeful time that revealed the worst the human species is capable of, Janusz Korczak – like Jan Karski, Hannah Senesh, Raoul Wallenberg, and others – refused to submit to a genocidal régime. Born Henryk Goldszmit, Korczak was a…
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Culture Disturbingly bigoted and irredeemably misogynistic? How will future readers view Philip Roth?
The Philip Roth We Don’t Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography By Jacques Berlinerblau University of Virginia Press, 208 pp, $29.95 According to an old joke, the Lone Ranger and his trusty sidekick Tonto find themselves surrounded. “We are going to die,” the Lone Ranger says, to which Tonto replies: “What do you mean ‘we?’” Though…
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Culture In search of a story of Jewish Vienna, a daughter becomes a detective
Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother’s Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind By Julie Metz Atria Books, 320 pp, $28 Intended as satire, “The City Without Jews” ended up as prophecy. Published in 1922, the novel imagines an antisemitic Austrian government mobilizing hundreds of boxcars to deport all of Vienna’s Jews….
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Culture In a historical time-bomb, echoes of Kafka and portents of Hitchcock
The Passenger By Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz Translated from German by Philip Boehm Metropolitan Books, 288 pp, $24.99 Unable to remember the phone number of the “friend” who offered to buy his house for an extortionist trifle, Otto Silbermann reflects that: “All misfortune stems from forgetfulness.” In “The Passenger,” Silbermann, a wealthy Jewish businessman, attempts to…
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Culture Heschel, Lipstadt, Wisse and Schneerson are here — but is that enough?
The New Jewish Canon: Ideas & Debates 1980-2015 Edited by Yehuda Kurtzer and Claire E. Sufrin Academic Studies Press, 492 pp, $39.95 What might now be called “the old Jewish canon” would consist of the Tanakh, Mishnah, and Gemara, as well as a few other widely studied texts such as “The Guide for the Perplexed”…
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