Joshua Jelly-Schapiro asked me to meet him on Frieda Zames Way, which is not an easy place to find on Google Maps. No street view photos, no subway wait times — nothing to feed our iPhone-era inclination to know exactly where we’re going, all the time. As any serious investigative journalist would, I immediately turned…
The publisher W.W. Norton has pulled its recently-released biography of Philip Roth from print after multiple women accused its author, Blake Bailey, of sexual assault. The Associated Press reported that Norton would stop printing of “Philip Roth: The Biography,” a much hyped, 912-page treatise on the author’s life, as well as Bailey’s 2014 memoir “The…
Deatra Cohen was studying to become an herbalist when her teacher assigned what seemed like a straightforward task: researching and reporting on the herbal cures and practices of her own culture. But the project was anything but simple. A retired librarian, Cohen was adept at navigating databases and combing through archives. But she could find…
Cambria Gordon’s family sabbatical in Madrid in 2016 became more than a time away from her native Los Angeles. Gordon felt her identity — as a writer and as a Jew — blossom. She launched into a journey of research and inquiry that led to the writing and publication of her new young adult novel,…
Editor’s note: Two weeks after this interview with Blake Bailey was published, multiple women came forward to accuse him of sexual assault and other sexual misconduct. Details of the allegations may be found here. A masterful writer obsessively preoccupied with whether and how he’d be valued by history; a deeply sensitive charmer with a real…
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…
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