I am going back to the mountaintop. In three weeks, I will return to Charlottesville, Virginia. It is not because last Saturday it became the site of an American pogrom. Last weekend dozens of people were injured during violence sparked by the Unite the Right rally and counter-protests. Two law enforcement officers were killed in…
BERLIN (JTA) — A new search in Germany for books stolen from Jews during the Third Reich is beginning to bear fruit. Recently, a man in California who was the only survivor of the Holocaust in his family received a book from Germany that had been dedicated to him by a teacher. The only other…
Disgraced ‘alt-right’ provocateur Milo Yiannapoulos hired dwarfs wearing yarmulkes to perform at a New York book launch party as part of an elaborate stunt to mock an observant Jewish rival. Yiannapoulos used the dwarfs to ridicule Ben Shapiro, the editor of the conservative website The Daily Wire, at a Thursday night shindig for his new…
In 1951, the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt published “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” her 600-page twin study of Nazism and Stalinism. The book received rave reviews; Norman Podhoretz, the Jewish New York intellectual, compared it to an epic poem. Then, 66 years later, in December of last year, Arendt’s book began selling at 16 times its…
This originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. To read the previous chapter. And so after some perfunctory small talk, an appointment was arranged. Yankel would meet with someone called Leah Spielman (he scribbled this into his small appointment book), daughter of Abe and Helen Spielman, refugees from the Old World, now living in Flatbush. “Appointment”…
An ultra-Orthodox group filed a complaint with Jerusalem police after HaGefen, a Messianic Jewish publisher, offered a new translation of the Bible to teenagers at Israel’s annual Hebrew Book Week. Yad L’Achim, a prominent activist group that has been known for harassing Christian missionaries to Israel and voicing opposition to Arab-Israeli marriages, complained that the…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Ellie R. Schainker, “Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817-1906” (Stanford University Press) In Sholem Asch’s novel “Petersburg,” Madam Kvasnetsova, an interesting Jewish woman who has converted to Christianity, owns a house in St. Petersburg and an inn for Jews who come to…
‘First they drive all the bookshops out of business, then they open a bookshop.” A fleeing British tourist voiced the suspicion of New Yorkers still mourning many of the city’s deceased independent bookstores at the May 25 opening of the Amazon bookstore in New York’s Time Warner Center. What’s the point of such a store?…
Excerpted from the book “No Country for Jewish Liberals.” This is a political and personal story about Israel, about how over the years it went one way and I went the other. I’m going to start where I live, literally—in the city (actually the sprawling suburban bedroom community) of Modi’in, which is truly a showcase…
Not long ago, I strolled along the spotless streets of Rawabi, a new Palestinian city being built near Ramallah, with Jack Nassar, the project’s development manager. He is an educated young man, smartly dressed and well compensated. We walked past the impressive amphitheater, strolled through expansive parks, saw the church and the mosque, and viewed…
It’s no secret that the second wave of the Feminist movement was propelled forward partially by Jewish women. Decades after some of the books written by these women were published, they continue to inspire women of all faiths and cultures to step and fight for the cause. Below, in no particular order, are 7 books…
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