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 The Susan Sontag of the Venetian Ghetto: Sarra Copia Sulam
According to Don Harrán, Sarra Copia Sulam was the first Italian Jewish woman to “excel” as a public literary figure, writing in various forms and leaving a “personal imprint on them.” She was a kind of Susan Sontag of the Venetian Ghetto. Sulam was also prominent because of her beauty and wealth (her husband was…
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Books Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot vs. Hitler
Agatha Christie (1890–1976), has long been underestimated by readers and fellow writers alike, despite her 80 novels which have sold a reported four billion copies. For example, the astute mystery writer P. D. James, in her newly published “Talking About Detective Fiction,” complains that Christie, with her “pasteboard characters,” has not had a “profound influence…
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Books Why Is This Night Different? Who’s Asking?
Open-Eyed Heart-Wide Haggadah By Debra Jill Mazer, edited by Shira Leba Batalion, designed by Margo Jennifer Akroyd Double Gemini Press, 62 pages, $32.95 In Every Generation: The JDC Haggadah Commentary by Ari L. Goldman, Foreword by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin Devora Publishing, 96 pages., $24.95 The Kabbalah Haggadah: Pesach Decoded By Yehuda Berg The Kabbalah Centre…
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Books Fuggin’ Addendum: More Kupferberg
Tuli Kupferberg — 86 year old beat poet, musician and activist, and famed leader of the avant-folk band The Fugs — has been on the news lately. An article on him appeared in the New York Times in late January , another piece was published here, in the Forward just last week, and Tablet carried…
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Books And On The Seventh Day She Rested
The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time By Judith Shulevitz Random House, 217 pages, $28 ‘The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time,” Judith Shulevitz’s look at the Judeo-Christian practice of setting aside every seventh day for rest, is both an extended exercise in public history and a spiritual autobiography….
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Books No Biblical Bodice-Ripper
The Prophet’s Wife By Milton Steinberg Behrman House, 384 pages, $24.95 One expects a book called “The Prophet’s Wife” — with a cover illustration of a lush, bucolic biblical setting — to be one more attempt at cashing in on the recent vogue of romantic, sexually suggestive fiction on biblical themes, written by women, and…
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Books An Eloquent Meditation on Memory
Blooms of Darkness By Aharon Appelfeld Schocken Books, 2010, 288 pp, $24 Aharon Appelfeld has earned an esteemed, if lonely, reputation for himself as Israel’s writer of the Nazi and pre-Nazi era. This landscape and its immediate aftermath form his near-exclusive literary topography. As a result, he is more often compared to Central European Jewish…
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Books The Beaten Cannoneer
Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim Edited and with an introduction by Mark Cohen Foreword by Dan Wakefield Syracuse University Press, 296 pages, $29.95 Literary criticism is literature that discusses other literature, situating whatever book or poem historically, while at the same time, relating the literary work to the extraliterary: to…
Explore
Most Popular
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Opinion Outrage over Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed on sexual assault of Palestinians is missing the point
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News They texted about Torah and mitzvahs. Feds say they were insider trading
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Culture At Eurovision, Israel’s near triumph shows the limits of tolerance
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Opinion I run The Jewish Theological Seminary. Here’s the real story about President Isaac Herzog speaking at our commencement
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Yiddish אַ שוועבנדיקע הילצערנע שיל בײַם ווענעציער ביענאַליי פֿון 2026 A floating wooden synagogue at the 2026 Venice Biennale
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