The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune By Zachary Leader Knopf, 832 pages, $40 ‘Was I a man or was I a jerk?” Saul Bellow asked on his deathbed. By “man,” of course, he meant mensch. Zachary Leader, Bellow’s new biographer, answers Bellow’s dying question: “Both.” Bellow was a jerk: Famously prickly and…
The Making of Zombie Wars By Aleksandar Hemon Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pages, $26 Aleksandar Hemon’s new novel “The Making of Zombie Wars” is preceded by two epigraphs. The first, attributed to the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, reads, “The mind can neither imagine anything, nor recollect past things, except while the body endures.” The second…
1) 297,885 Jews live in Illinois. 2) The first recorded Jewish resident in Illinois was John Hays who lived in Cahokia, near the Missouri border. He was a farmer, trader, and soldier, and served as St. Clair County’s postmaster until 1798, when he was appointed sheriff. 3) Music entrepreneur Sol Bloom developed the Midway Plaisance,…
Compulsion By Meyer Levin Fig Tree Books, 480 pages, $15.95 Why, in 2015, should we be interested in a novel that was written 60 years ago? Moreover, why are we interested in a crime that was committed 90 years ago? When I was growing up in New York in the 1950s, there was no one…
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel strongly defended the firing of a white police officer who was photographed with a colleague holding rifles and posing over a black man wearing antlers like an animal killed on a hunt, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. “Good riddance,” Emanuel said. “Let me be clear: That photo does not represent the values…
Josh Ozersky, an award-winning Jewish food writer, drowned in a Chicago hotel room shower after suffering a seizure, authorities reportedly said Wednesday. The James Beard Award winner drowned May 4 in his room at the Conrad Hotel, the Cook County medical examiner’s office told the Chicago Sun-Times. An autopsy revealed the cause of death and…
Rabbi Byron Sherwin, a Jewish scholar and ethicist who served on the faculty of Chicago’s Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership for more than 40 years, has died. Sherwin died on May 22 at the age of 69 following a long illness. He served as Distinguished Service Professor and Director of Doctoral Programs at…
Jewish families in the West Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago have hired off-duty Chicago police officers to patrol the neighborhood in the wake of several anti-Semitic incidents. The armed officers were hired to patrol a 16-block area populated largely by Orthodox Jewish families on the Jewish Sabbath and holidays, when residents walk to synagogue and…
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