Refuge in Hell: How Berlin’s Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis By Daniel Silver Houghton Mifflin, 295 pages, $24. * * *| On April 24, 1945, when Soviet troops liberated a Berlin hospital, they discovered the unfathomable inside its doors. Two years after Joseph Goebbels had proudly professed the Nazi capital Judenrein, there functioned a Jewish…
It’s finally here: a synagogue in New York City for people who summer in the Hamptons. Thirteen years ago in Westhampton, Rabbi Marc Schneier founded the Hampton Synagogue, a spiritual center for urbanites nestled in the well-to-do wilds of Long Island for the summer season. In what seemed like a New York minute, the synagogue…
Many observers have anointed scientist Brian Greene the intellectual heir to the late Carl Sagan, the famed author, astronomer and television host credited with popularizing science to a mass audience through his 1980 public television series, Cosmos. “It’s very flattering,” Greene said of the comparison. “Carl Sagan was a hero of mine growing up. But…
A Faker’s Dozen: Stories By Melvin Jules Bukiet W.W. Norton & Company, 268 pages, $23.95. * * *| If a baker’s dozen is 13, then what is a faker’s dozen? Try 11, because that is the number of stories Melvin Jules Bukiet gives us in his new collection of stories, “A Faker’s Dozen.” You can…
HAMELN, Germany — Sounds of hammering and sawing came from the back of the six-year-old Jewish community center in this Lower Saxony town. Three older men, all volunteers, were at work on a stage for the new prayer room. Surrounded by sawdust and pine planks, the men took a break to debate, in Russian, the…
By her own account, Montreal resident Edeet Ravel has been fairly negligent about getting her writing into print. Which is why it amazed the Israeli-born author and former high-school teacher when the British publisher Headline found her letter in its slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts; the firm asked to see more than the five pages…
Nazis in Newark By Warren Grover Transaction Publishers, 380 pages, $49.95. * * *| Current Garden State antisemitism is one thing — see, for example, the works of New Jersey’s former poet laureate, Newark’s Amiri Baraka — but Nazis? In Newark? Warren Grover’s scholarly text bearing the provocative title “Nazis in Newark” is a history…
An October 10 article, “New Republic Cancels an Invite to Foe of Saudis,” mischaracterized Stephen Schwartz’s affiliation with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He was formerly the director of the foundation’s Islam and Democracy Project and is no longer affiliated with the foundation.
A Window Across the River By Brian Morton Harcourt, 304 pages, $25. * * *| Writers are often told not to write novels about writing. The temptation must be tremendous. After all, they know the territory and the tools, and to a novelist, few things are more gripping than the process of putting words on…
Tales From the Blogosphere: On October 17, the Anti-Defamation League charged The New Republic senior editor Gregg Easterbrook with “either absolute ignorance or total bigotry” for writing in his Web log that “Jewish executives” in Hollywood “worship money above all else.” Three days, two editorial apologies and one lost job later, the ADL considered the…
And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank By Steve Oney Pantheon Books, 742 pages, $35. * * *| On August 16, 1915, Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman from the North who had been living and working in Atlanta, was snatched from a jail cell by 25…
