It is hard to imagine Rabbi Akiva eating lime Jell-O, Maimonides living in a trailer park, or Martin Buber twirling a baton. These are all, according to the famous mid-century comedian Lenny Bruce, quintessentially goyish activities. I.B. Singer is more likely to have slathered his cream cheese on pumpernickel than white bread. Bruce defined Jewishness…
“Mad & Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency” is one book you can judge by its cover, which depicts aristocratic men, faces covered by pink splotches, and aristocratic women … holding cans of spray paint. The non-fiction book, released earlier this month, is about the female artists and scientists, women of color, queer women and…
For Herman Wouk, who turned 102 in May, the “main task” of his life has been using his novels to teach readers about history. “To, so far as I could, fix down in literature what happened in World War II and the Holocaust,” he told CBS Sunday Morning. “That was my main task.” Wouk, who…
Below, dear Sisterhood readers, you will find links to some stories that at least one Jewish woman (moi) thought seemed enticing. -At Eater, Charlotte Druckman published a Paris dining guide with a Jewish twist: “I remember, as we walked the narrow, cobblestoned streets with even narrower sidewalks that are the oldest part of the city,…
Ben Lerner, 36, began his writing career as a poet, but his two debut novels, one published in 2011 and the other last year, quickly gained critical acclaim and have both been called “brilliant” and “revolutionary,” among other praise. This year Lerner received a MacArthur “genius” fellowship of $625,000 for his work. Though he has…
Sigal Samuel and I grew up in the same city, attended the same college and ended up in the same office. Before that momentous event, our paths had never crossed. (Full disclosure: since then, we have become attached at the hip — or the byline.) I grew up in a secular, if proudly Sephardic, environment….
Alexandrian Summer By Yitzhak Gormezano Goren Translated by Yardenne Greenspan New Vessel Press, 200 pages, $15.99 Late in Israeli writer Yitzhak Gormezano Goren’s luminous 1978 novel “Alexandrian Summer,” which has just been published for the first time in English in a fluid translation by Yardenne Greenspan, a tired rabbi watches disapprovingly as a group of…
By Kamel Daoud, translated from the French by John Cullen Other Press, 160 Pages, $14.95 Kamel Daoud kick-starts his novel with the line “Mama’s still alive today,” turning inside out the celebrated opening of Albert Camus’s “The Stranger”: “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.” What would Camus say were he alive today,…
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