This is the Forward’s coverage of books and literature, including both non-fictional and fictional works.
Books
The Latest
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Books Wizardly Weaver Who Invented ‘Role Models’
The American sociologist Robert K. Merton, who died in 2003 at age 92, was a longtime fixture at Columbia University, where he invented such now-standard terms as “role model” and “self-fulfilling prophecy,” as well as the concept of a “focus group.” A thoughtful new study, out on September 14 from Columbia University Press, “Robert K….
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Books Soviet Literature in Dark Times
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. Translated by Ezra Glinter. When I bought Natalia Gromova’s book, “The Downfall: The Fate of a Soviet Critic in the 1940 and ‘50s,” it didn’t occur to me that it would have a Jewish dimension. I’m generally interested in this period and in this subject, and…
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Books ‘I Remember Papa,’ Fottorino Says of his Moroccan Jewish Father
At the tender age of 50 Éric Fottorino is not just CEO of the company which owns the French daily “Le Monde,” but also a prize-winning novelist. And now Nice-born Fottorino has just produced an intensely personal memoir addressing his Jewish ancestry, “Questions for my Father,” recently published by Les éditions Gallimard. Fottorino belatedly reconnected…
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Books Of a Jewish Banking Dynasty, Only the Sculptures Survived
Edmund de Waal, a British artist and the son of a clergyman of the Church of England, knew he was missing a vital part of himself, but he wasn’t sure what it was. A middle-aged married father of three, he had spent his adult life ensconced in his London studio, where he made thousands of…
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Books ?Exodus? Redux
Our Exodus: Leon Uris and the Americanization of Israel?s Founding Story By M.M. Silver Wayne State University Press, 280 pages, $29.95 Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller By Ira Nadel University of Texas Press, 376 pages, $27.95 The 1958 novel ?Exodus? by Leon Uris, and the 1960 blockbuster movie that it inspired, set to…
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Books How (and Why) We Saved Soviet Jewry
When They Come for Us, We?ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle To Save Soviet Jewry By Gal Beckerman Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 608 pages, $30 It is easy enough to understand why Gal Beckerman chose the somewhat melodramatic title, ?When They Come for Us, We?ll be Gone,? for his masterful and highly readable history of the…
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Books Background Check On a Nazi Hunter
Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends By Tom Segev Doubleday, 448 pages, $32.50 When I was contributing to Simon Wiesenthal?s obituary in 2005 for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, I learned something that surprised me: The legendary Nazi-hunter didn?t personally hunt down a lot of Nazis. Sure, Wiesenthal helped capture some Nazis and their collaborators, and…
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Books To the End and Back Again
To the End of the Land By David Grossman. Alfred A. Knopf, 582 pages, $27.95 There is a moment in David Grossman?s novel, ?See Under: Love,? when an Israeli son of Holocaust survivors gazes at his own sleeping child and remarks to his beaming wife: ??It?s a good thing he can sleep through all the…
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News What We Know About Jeffrey Epstein’s Childhood
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Politics AIPAC fails its first test in the midterms
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Fast Forward Mamdani appoints Phylisa Wisdom, progressive Jewish leader, to run Office to Combat Antisemitism
In Case You Missed It
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Opinion In Trump’s instinct to punish and desecrate, a rejection of the values of King David
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Culture Why Bad Bunny’s halftime show delighted New York Jews of a certain age
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Yiddish World Elie Wiesel as an American phenomenon and a family man
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Culture These two anti-Zionist Jews think the Israeli government is so bad, it’s funny
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