Book Reviews

Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent

By
Paul Mendes-Flohr
Review by
Rabbi A. James Rudin
In his highly readable and concise biography – Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent (Yale University Press) – of the famous philosopher, Paul Mendes-Flohr, chief editor of the 22-volume German language collection of Buber’s works, described him as a man who championed “a life of dialogue” and taught that “all real living is meeting.”

Alfred Stieglitz: Taking Pictures, Making Painters

By
Phyllis Rose
Review by
Rabbi A. James Rudin
Phyllis Rose’s book Alfred Stieglitz: Taking Pictures, Making Painters (part of Yale’s Jewish Lives series) brings her subject out of the shadows and into his deserved place in history as the person who made “taking pictures” a respected art form.

Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "The American Dream"

By
Sarah Churchwell
Review by
Rabbi A. James Rudin
Many American Jews shuddered as Donald Trump proclaimed, “The American Dream is dead!” and “America first!” to rally crowds during his 2016 presidential campaign. We remembered how, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, these slogans were an open call for virulent anti-Semitism, pro-Nazi sentiment, white supremacy, xenophobia, and nativism.

Beyond the Shadows: The Holocaust and the Danish Exception

By
Judy Glickman Lauder (with texts by Elie Wiesel, Michael Berenbaum, Judith S. Goldstein, and others)
Review by
Rose Eichenbaum
Judy Glickman Lauder’s photographs in Beyond the Shadows: The Holocaust and the Danish Exception are so masterfully crafted they make us feel as if we ourselves are on the train tracks approaching Treblinka, behind the barbed wire fence at Majdanek, at the entrance of Dachau under the sign Arbeit Macht Frei, outside a gas chamber at Auschwitz. Faced with these images, we can’t help but imagine what it must have been like for the millions of innocents who entered these passageways, in most cases never to return.

Mavericks, Mystics & False Messiahs: Episodes from the Margins of Jewish History

By
Pini Dunner
Review by
Rabbi A. James Rudin
In Mavericks, Mystics & False Messiahs: Episodes from the Margins of Jewish History, Pini Dunner provides a series of bizarre stories describing how some Jews crashed through conventional guardrails of staid Jewish tradition and sped forward onto aberrant lanes of false messiahs, forgers of Passover Haggadot, rabbis searching for subversive religious meanings of Hebrew amulets, and an 18 th-century British lord who converted to Judaism.

Muck: A Novel

By
Dror Burstein
Review by
Marcia R. Rudin
In this re-telling of the life of Jeremiah, the second major prophet in the Hebrew Bible, Dror Burstein, an Israeli poet and novelist who teaches literature at Tel Aviv and Hebrew universities, interweaves all aspects of the modern world, including cell phones, fax machines, computers, and high-speed transit with the ancient Jerusalem in which the First Temple dominates the horizon. T

Annelies: A Novel

By
David R. Gillham
Review by
Marcia R. Rudin
David R. Gillham’s Annelies: A Novel (Viking and Penguin Books) is a fictionalized portrayal of Anne Frank based on the premise that she recovers from her illness in Bergen-Belsen, returns to post-war Amsterdam, and is reunited with her father, Otto, whom she calls Pim.

The Parting Gift

By
Evan Fallenberg
Review by
Marcia R. Rudin
I am approaching my fiftieth wedding anniversary, but I have vague memories from my long-ago youth of what it’s like to fall in love at first sight. Such experiences did not end well for me; neither does the affair portrayed in the story The Parting Gift (Other Press), written by Evan Fallenberg, an Ohio-born writer who now lives in Israel.

The Family Tabor

By
Cherise Wolas
Review by
Courtney Naliboff
What do we choose to show to others, and what do we keep hidden? How do we curate our public face?