JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
(JTA) – The Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, an annual award that comes with $100,000, this year went to Menachem Kaiser for his nonfiction book “Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure.” In his debut book, Kaiser recounts his efforts to use the Polish legal system to reclaim ownership of a building…
Up until COVID, I started my Tuesday evenings shlepping on the subway to the mid-Manhattan Workers Circle for a Yiddish class. As a child, I’d studied the language in an afternoon shule/school in the Bronx. Now, decades later, I felt a quiet pull to study it once again. Kolya Borodulin is the director of Yiddish…
Every Passover, I find that my contributions to the Seder are somewhat limited. My niece and nephew have now been charged with the task of asking the four questions and my mother’s food preparations are almost sacred unto themselves. This year, though, I’ve been tasked with the delightful job of considering literary readings that are…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The American writer Joshua Cohen’s last two books, Book of Numbers and Witz, were considerable epic novels that dealt with philosophical issues through a mix of satirical realism and grotesque fantasy. But his new book, “Moving Kings” (both a name of a company and an allegorical key),…
I just learned of the death yesterday of Sami Rohr, the businessman and philanthropist powerhouse behind the growth of Chabad around the world. He was also the namesake of an incredible literary prize that his children endowed in his name on his 80th birthday and that I was so grateful to receive this past year….
