Defining Israel: The Jewish State, Democracy, and the Law
Defining Israel: The Jewish State, Democracy, and the Law (HUC Press) is a dense, essential volume for anyone who wants to unpack the maze of documentation and thought at the heart of
A Bookshop in Berlin: The Rediscovered Memoir of One Woman's Harrowing Escape from the Nazis
Rabbi James Rudin reviews A Bookshop in Berlin, a story of survival and resilience, of human cruelty and human spirit.
The Mandela Plot
Adolescence, otherness, and Apartheid make a literally explosive cocktail in National Jewish Book Award winner Kenneth Bonert’s new novel, The Mandela Plot. Half hyperbolic adventure and half historical fiction, Bonert elevates his unlikely hero, Martin Helger, to almost mythic status, while reminding readers both of South Africa’s Jewish diaspora and the horrors of Apartheid.
Gershom Scholem: Master of the Kabbalah
Professor Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) of the Hebrew University – arguably the greatest Jewish scholar of the 20th century – considered himself an archeologist. No, not the kind of person who digs into the history-laden soil of Israel, but rather one who delves into the Jewish religious tradition that Scholem described as “a field strewn with ruins."
How Hitler Was Made: Germany and the Rise of the Perfect Nazi
Does the world need yet another book about Adolf Hitler?
Hunting the Truth: Memoirs of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld
Even the fearless Gabriel Allon, Daniel Silva’s fictional Israeli intelligence agent, would be awestruck by the real life exploits of the Nazi-hunting husband and wife team of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld
Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death
Nearly 40 years have passed since Dan White, a disgruntled political rival, shot and killed San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, and Mayor George Moscone in their City Hall offices
I, Sarah Steinway
The specter of a flood-swept future is all too easy to envision. In the past two years alone, catastrophic floods have inundated parts of Maryland, Texas, and Louisiana
The Comedown
There is pleasure to be had in a work of fiction whose scope spans two generations. Characters are introduced or shown in flashbacks as children, and we see how they fulfill – or don’t – the expectations placed on them by their parents, or how traumas they experience later come to bear. In The Comedown (Henry Holt) – as in Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi’s recent epic of the African diaspora, or Amy Tan’s classic The Joy Luck Club – Rebekah Frumkin explores the ways in which choices made by parents echo through children and grandchildren for decades
Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling
In Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), literary critic and poet Adam Kirsch presents us with a collection of 270 letters spanning the period from 1924 to 1975, the year of literary critic Lionel Trilling’s death at the age of 70. The letters are organized in chronological order rather than thematically, juxtaposing love letters to his wife Diana (an important literary critic in her own right) to discourses on his favorite British authors, to dealings with his psychoanalysts.