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…
There’s a gut-clenchingly tender moment midway through “Little Eyes,” Samanta Schweblin’s deft and ineffably creepy new novel, when Emilia, a lonely Peruvian widow, gazes on a pair of closed eyes. “It had been a very long time since she had seen anyone with their eyes closed,” she observes; not since her son, a banker based…
I spent my childhood summers in a small beach town near Mystic, Conn., swimming in the frigid Fishers Island Sound, catching crabs by affixing sliced hot dogs — or, in a pinch, mussels crushed beneath a paving stone — to thick white string and dangling the bait off the dock. I accompanied my older cousin…
Amazon has removed several white nationalist and anti-Semitic books from its website, a change from its past policy of defending the sale of objectionable publications, The New York Times reported Sunday. While the online marketplace has frequently removed things like anti-Semitic action figures and Christmas ornaments listed for purchase by third-party sellers, it has traditionally…
White House senior advisor Jared Kushner was widely mocked after telling Sky News Arabia that he was qualified to propose a new Israeli-Palestinian peace plan because he had “read 25 books” about the conflict. While the White House refused to tell the Forward what those books were, our reporting uncovered four of them. But it…
Editor’s Note: In 2018, the Forward published this essay raising concerns about female representation in Jewish Studies, focused on a 2017 book about Hasidism. One of its authors responded this month with a broader critique of diversity in the field. The original critics then had another take, and now more of the authors are responding….
Louisa May Alcott was often told as a child that her dark hair and dark eyes came from her Sephardic Jewish ancestry. Her mother, Abigail May Alcott, who had similar coloring, had learned this from her father, Joseph May, a late 18th-century Boston businessman whose Portuguese Jewish ancestors immigrated to Sussex, England, just before 1500….
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