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Johanna Kaplan’s Miraculous Ear
Donald Weber reviews an author whose work might not be so well-known in Britain. Johanna Kaplan arrived on the literary scene almost fifty years ago as a superb interpreter of American Jewish life at mid-century, a time of social mobility, yet also an era haunted by the still raw traumas of the past. Loss of […]
All About Eva
In this exclusive extract from his new book, All About Eva: A Holocaust-Related Memoir, with a Hollywood Twist, Vincent Brook reminisces about his German Jewish parents’ experiences in Nazi Germany and their early years as refugees in Los Angeles, where Vincent’s mother, Eva, had an extramarital affair with famed Polish Jewish actor Alexander Granach. When […]
Borowski’s Brutal Vision
Donald Weber reviews Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories by Tadeusz Borowski. The publication of the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski’s Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories is a significant event for students of Holocaust literature. Sent to Auschwitz as a political prisoner in 1943, at the age of 21, and released from Dachau […]
Meeting the Mailers
Sue Fox remembers author Norman Mailer and members of his family. I last interviewed writer Norman Mailer, at home in Cape Cod, in 2007. I had interviewed him the previous year for Relative Values, with his son, John. They had written a novel – The Big Empty – together. John, was 29, film-star handsome – the […]
A Jewish Panther
Aidan Beatty reviews a new biography of Meir Kahane. It is now generally well recognised that America has never recovered from the 1960s; the Civil Rights Movement brought about the dismantling of Jim Crow segregation in the South but that was then replaced by the mass incarceration and unreformed police brutality that Black Lives Matter […]
Jewish Maternal Journal
Laura Godfrey-Isaacs celebrates the powerful legacy of journaling by Jewish women and girls. When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived! But, and that’s a big question, will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer? — […]
A left response to left antisemitism: Is it too late for education?
Two recently-published books try and educate the left against antisemitism. Will they succeed?
A Lone Lee Man of Comics
Nathan Abrams reviews a new biography of Stan Lee. ‘This is a particular pleasure — or frustration, depending on one’s point of view — for Jewish critics, who have spent decades and spun a small cottage industry arguing about just what the new mythology is constructed by American Jewish artists owe to the old ideas […]
WeWTFWork*
Nathan Abrams finds something fresh in a new book about the co-working startup, WeWork and its founder Adam Neumann. WeWork was the co-working company started by the charismatic Israeli Adam Neumann which grew into a billion-dollar unicorn. Neumann styled it as a Kabbalistic-infused capitalist kibbutz. I won’t recount the story here because Neumann and WeWork […]
What the Dickens?
by Clarissa Hyman I never learnt to tango or teach myself Russian (to read Tolstoy in the original, of course), nor did I excavate the loft, repaint the kitchen or sort out the old family photos. And don’t even bring up the subject of updating the website. I baked far too many loaves of banana […]