NON-FICTION In “Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt Robert Gottlieb,” Robert Gottlieb trims away the fat from the storied life of the legendary actress, who was born Jewish and who was later baptized a Roman Catholic. Gottlieb presents a peppy and concise biography rooted in facts and recorded accounts. The book, the debut title in…
On Monday, Sue Fishkoff wrote about people who only keep kosher on holidays. She is the author of “Kosher Nation: Why More and More of America’s Food Answers to a Higher Authority.” Her blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author…
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree Many moons ago, when I was a graduate student in Jewish history happily spending my days doing little else but reading, one of the most intriguing books I encountered was not Maimonides’ “Guide to the Perplexed,” or “Transactions of the Paris Sanhedrin” or, for that matter, Hannah Arendt’s “The…
Michael Wex is best known for his acerbic, authoritative books on Yiddish language and culture, but in this fall’s “The Frumkiss Family Business,” he has turned his attention to fiction. The sprawling novel is a farcical family saga, following three generations of a Jewish clan in Toronto’s Bathurst Manor neighborhood and questioning, in Wex’s characteristically…
After the well-deserved hosannas of praise for the centenary, and subsequent dignified mourning for the demise, of the great French Jewish anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, a backlash seemed inevitable. On October 7, “Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory,” by Patrick Wilcken, presented as the “definitive account of the life, work, and legacy,” was published by…
The story goes that a certain heathen approached the Jewish sage Shammai and asked to be converted, on the condition that he is taught the entire Torah while standing on one foot. Indignant at receiving such a ludicrous request, Shammai chased the man away. Undeterred, the heathen then approached the sage Hillel with the same…
The American sociologist Robert K. Merton, who died in 2003 at age 92, was a longtime fixture at Columbia University, where he invented such now-standard terms as “role model” and “self-fulfilling prophecy,” as well as the concept of a “focus group.” A thoughtful new study, out on September 14 from Columbia University Press, “Robert K….
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. Translated by Ezra Glinter. When I bought Natalia Gromova’s book, “The Downfall: The Fate of a Soviet Critic in the 1940 and ‘50s,” it didn’t occur to me that it would have a Jewish dimension. I’m generally interested in this period and in this subject, and…
At the tender age of 50 Éric Fottorino is not just CEO of the company which owns the French daily “Le Monde,” but also a prize-winning novelist. And now Nice-born Fottorino has just produced an intensely personal memoir addressing his Jewish ancestry, “Questions for my Father,” recently published by Les éditions Gallimard. Fottorino belatedly reconnected…
Edmund de Waal, a British artist and the son of a clergyman of the Church of England, knew he was missing a vital part of himself, but he wasn’t sure what it was. A middle-aged married father of three, he had spent his adult life ensconced in his London studio, where he made thousands of…
Our Exodus: Leon Uris and the Americanization of Israel?s Founding Story By M.M. Silver Wayne State University Press, 280 pages, $29.95 Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller By Ira Nadel University of Texas Press, 376 pages, $27.95 The 1958 novel ?Exodus? by Leon Uris, and the 1960 blockbuster movie that it inspired, set to…
דאָס ביכל נעמט אַרײַן אַ גלאָסאַר, שמועס־פֿראַגעס און קלאַנג־רעקאָרדירונגען פֿון די דערציילונגען.
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