JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Tova Mirvis is the author of Visible City, among other books. Her latest work, The Book of Separation, was published in September 2017.
Tova Mirvis is the author of Visible City, among other books. Her latest work, The Book of Separation, was published in September 2017.
After the weeks of Jewish holidays, the last thing I wanted was another celebration. “Why can’t we trick-or-treat?” my kids wanted to know a few days before Halloween. “It’s not a Jewish holiday,” I answered automatically, the same words that I’d always spoken and that my mother had once spoken to me. Until this year,…
Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife By Francine Prose HarperCollins, 336 pages, $24.99. The diary that Anne Frank so famously kept was found by Miep Gies and given to Anne’s father, Otto Frank, when he alone survived and returned to the secret annex after the war. The published version of those pages was…
The Kaddish prayer is not only a thrice-daily means of memorializing a loved one, but also a literary framework that myriad writers have used for telling their stories of loss, from Leon Wieseltier’s dazzlingly vast “Kaddish” to Ari Goldman’s deeply moving and personal “Living a Year of Kaddish.” In the case of Isa Milman’s “Prairie…
Apparently the New York Times Book Review now runs tzitzit checks. Or, in my case, a sheitel check. In her recent essay titled, “The Observant Reader,” Wendy Shalit takes issue with the way Orthodox Judaism is portrayed in various works of fiction. She chastises several fiction writers — myself included — for misrepresenting Orthodoxy, particularly…
