Milo, the protagonist of “The Phantom Tollbooth,” may be just ten years old. But readers may recall he experiences a very grown-up brand of ennui. “Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he’d bothered,” we learn of Milo in the first pages of the children’s…
When artist Riva Lehrer was a child, Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” deeply resonated with her. Her association with the legend was understandable—Lehrer was born with spina bifida, a condition when the spine and spinal column do not fuse in utero. Lehrer was born in 1958, when 90% of children with spina bifida did not survive. It…
If you think female rabbis are a modern phenomenon, Sigal Samuel is here to change your mind — just like she changed hers. Samuel grew up in an Orthodox community where the idea of female clergy was considered deeply untraditional. So when, deep in an “internet rabbit hole,” she stumbled on the story of the…
Read this article in Yiddish What were the most important Jewish texts of the last 40 years? What did the Jewish opinion-makers have to say about the most important issues of Jewish survival? Yehuda Kurtzer and Claire Sufrin attempt to answer these questions in a collection of 70 selected documents called “The New Jewish Canon:…
“To Be a Man” By Nicole Krauss Harper, 240 pages, $21.59 Noa, the teenage protagonist and narrator of Nicole Krauss’s short story “End Days,” wakes up with two disasters on her mind: the wildfires that have just “jumped the borders” into Los Angeles, where she lives, and her parents’ impending divorce. Compared to one couple’s…
Midway through “Evening,” Nessa Rapoport’s second novel, two teenage sisters stand in the bathroom, squabbling. Eve is readying herself for a date with Laurie, an older boy who happens to be a friend of her sister, Tam, and Tam is scolding her: For the steam with which she’s filled their bathroom, the perfume she’s sprayed…
Halfway through Elena Ferrante’s new novel, “The Lying Life of Adults,” the narrator, a teenage girl named Giovanna, runs into a priest. Don Giacomo has fallen into disfavor at his church. Previously buoyant, his skin has turned sallow, and a mysterious, violet rash is creeping over one of his hands. Giovanna, ever curious, asks Giacomo…
The summer before my freshman year of high school, I was required to read two books. The first was “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” And the second was “Snow in August” by Pete Hamill, who passed away on August 5 at 85. For most of my life, growing up in Denver, Colorado, I had only two Jewish…
Shai Agnon was born on this day in 1888. To commemorate that auspicious day, we return to this story, originally published in 2013, about Israel’s only Nobel laureate for literature. Sitting in a lecture hall in the Talpiot section of Jerusalem, a group of 25 immigrants is discussing “A City and Its Fullness” (“Ir U’meloah”…
There may be no better way of handling a death in the family, at least in the American imagination, than hopping in the car and driving somewhere — anywhere. A road trip, especially to some meaningful destination, can be a gesture of respect for the mourned or a step towards renewal for the mourner. It’s…
“Timing is everything.” Larry Cohler-Esses wrote that line in 1995 in a Forward news story about my book contract with Simon and Schuster. I was the American Jewish Committee’s expert on antisemitism at the time. I had written a report on the militia movement ten days before the Oklahoma City bombing predicting attacks on government…
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