JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Anne Frank is alive. Pick up a novel and you’ll find her hearty and well, decades after the Holocaust. She is living in the northeastern United States, an attractive young woman or a traumatized crone. She is a writer whose adult accomplishments never live up to those of her youthful diary. She is the idol…
It’s Oscars weekend, and, for once, the often-predictable ceremony has the admittedly mild potential to be genuinely interesting. On the biggest night of Hollywood’s year, how will presenters, performers and award-winners address the ongoing revelations of pervasive sexual assault and harassment that began with The New York Times’s exposé on Harvey Weinstein? A surprising number…
Hulu’s television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” has gained general acclaim as a feminist manifesto for our times. But critic and novelist Francine Prose isn’t buying it. Writing in The New York Review of Books last week, Prose wrote that the show, which explores a fictionalized future United States in which…
Philip Roth, Stephen Sondheim, Art Spiegelman and a number of other Jewish luminaries have lent their names to an open letter beseeching President Trump to reconsider restricting entry to the country for refugees from around the world and immigrants from a group of Muslim-majority countries. The letter, signed by 65 writers and artists and written…
On Monday, January 30, The Guardian published a provocatively-titled opinion piece by author Francine Prose: “Forget protest. Trump’s actions warrant a general national strike.” In the column, Prose pondered the successes won by airport-based protests of President Donald Trump’s January 27 executive order on immigrants and refugees, which prevents all Syrian citizens from entering the…
Last week, the New York Times named its “100 Notable Books of 2016.” Included in their number were many reviewed by the Forward. Those included Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Here I Am,” Michael Chabon’s “Moonglow,” Affinity Konar’s “Mischling,” Boris Fishman’s “Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo,” Deborah Levy’s “Hot Milk,” Adam Kirsch’s “The People and the…
Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern By Francine Prose Yale University Press, 240 pages, $25 I feel compelled to begin my review of the novelist Francine Prose’s biography of art dealer and collector Peggy Guggenheim with a lengthy quote from another writer, in this case the Russian playwright Vladimir Sorokin, who wrote about Guggenheim…
Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 By Francine Prose Harper, 448 pages, $26.99 The plot of Francine Prose’s new novel, “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932,” sounds, in an admittedly reductive summary, slightly preposterous: A cross-dressing French lesbian racecar driver collaborates with the Nazis, revealing where the Maginot Line ends, thus enabling the…
