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An Unfathomable Nightmare
Donald Weber admires a new translation of Lion Feuchtwanger The Oppermanns. “Berlin is a city full of future émigrés,” Lion Feuchtwanger declared in 1931, prophesying his own fate two years before the 1933 publication of his deeply prescient novel, The Oppermanns. By then, the well-known author, a political novelist and playwright affiliated with Brecht and […]
“No Jews were harmed”
Nathan Abrams reviews a new book about the work of the filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen. In a review about the Jewishness of the films of the brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, it would be far too easy to devote attention just to A Serious Man. This is their most obviously Jewish film and probably […]
On (not) celebrating Jewish diversity
Keith Kahn-Harris explains how highlighting the diversity of British Jews through photography raises some uncomfortable issues
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 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?
Yiddisher Psychogeography of a Small Planet
David Balsmo explores Emanuel Litvinoff, Jewish Space and Place as revealed through the lockdown. It is now just over a year since the pandemic forced the U.K. into lockdown, during this time the promise of an expanding world with multifarious connections has shrunk. Yes, we have Zoom and other platforms, but non-virtual experience contracted with […]
‘The Greening of America’ 50 Years Later
Martin Elliot Jaffe looks back at a landmark book and its enduring relevance for today. As a college student in 1970, I was captivated by the vision of a new America articulated by Yale Law Professor Charles Reich in his best-selling The Greening of America, where the ethos of enlightened, privileged middle-class college students were […]
Agent Sonya: Eshet Chayil
Nathan Abrams on Agent Sonya, a book about a remarkable Jewish spy. Not many non-fiction books open a paragraph with the sentence, ‘Ursula lay awake wondering whether to murder her nanny’. But then the subject of this book is unusual: a Jewish woman, housewife and spy, who spied for the Soviet Union and successfully escaped the clutches of Stalin, MI5 and […]
The problem of love in Corbyn’s Labour Party: Reflections on Left Out
How Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire’s ‘Left Out’ shows how love was always a greater problem than hate in Corbyn’s Labour Party