JTA — Howard Jacobson is a funny writer. He has penned several comedic novels, and many commentators said his 2010 Man Booker prize-winning work “The Finkler Question” was the first humorous book to win the prestigious award in decades. But Jacobson, one of the most celebrated authors in the United Kingdom and an outspoken liberal…
Three of the United Kingdom’s most prominent Jewish authors stepped forward yesterday to condemn anti-Semitism in one of the country’s leading political parties. In a Letter to the Editor published in The Times, Simon Schama, Howard Jacobson and Simon Sebag Montefiore criticized the Labour Party, led since 2015 by Jeremy Corbyn, for failing to check…
Pussy By Howard Jacobson Random House 208 pages, $22.95 ‘I keep being told by people that I’m becoming a bit of a ranter,” Howard Jacobson warned me about halfway into our conversation. We were sitting, having tea, in the main room of his London apartment, which is framed at one end by floor-to-ceiling windows, as…
Shylock Is My Name By Howard Jacobson Hogarth Shakespeare, 288 pages, $25 What to do with Shylock? I was pondering this question recently while browsing in a Barnes and Noble, when I noticed that they’d helpfully labeled the Humor shelf, “Books that make you laugh.” Especially with regard to some of them (“What Would Jesus…
The question is rhetorical. When will Jews be forgiven the Holocaust? Never. The shocking psychological truth is that man rejects the burden of guilt by turning the tables on those we have wronged and portraying ourselves as the victims of their suffering. The Roman historian Tacitus spells it out. “It is part of human life,”…
Zoo Time By Howard Jacobson Bloomsbury USA, 384 pages, $26 Just because most of us don’t fantasize continuously about ditching our wives for our mothers-in-law doesn’t mean it’s not an excellent premise for a novel. In fact, those very images my opening sentence elicits (and, likewise I’m sure, similar ones for fathers-in-law) are probably the…
In this, the second annual Forward Fives selection, we celebrate the year’s cultural output with a series of deliberately eclectic choices in film, music, theater, exhibitions and books. Here we present five of the most important Jewish novels of 2010. Feel free to argue with and add to our selections in the comments. It’s been…
This year’s Man Booker Prize shortlist featured two authors who write about groups not often represented in British literature. Howard Jacobson, author of “The Finkler Question,” has made a career crafting a literary image of the English Jew, while Andrea Levy, shortlisted for “The Long Song,” has documented the black British experience in her five…
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