Books

An Unorthodox Match by Naomi Ragen, St. Martin’s Press © 2019, ISBN 9781250-161222; 322 pages plus acknowledgments and glossary; $27.99 I once had a rabbi who inveighed against religious hypocrisy with this saying: “Big beard, small...

“As comprehensive as it is critical, this latest exposé from Jacobsen is perhaps her most important work to date….Jacobsen persuasively shows that it in fact happened and aptly frames the dilemma….Rife with hypocrisy, lies,...

Hope is not a noun regional analysts of the Red-Sea-Rim associate with Somalia. Regardless of their optic — political, security, cultural, economic — most analysts offer,  following the Africanist school of Martin Meredith, grim reasons...

In the era of Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, movie moguls tended to spice their jargon with expressions from the colorful vernacular of their pushcart-peddling forebears. The euphony of Yiddish is a tradition...

By the end of the Holocaust, Lithuania suffered one of the highest percentages of Jewish deaths in all of Europe. Before the war, 168, 000 Jews lived there, of which 83 per cent were...

Every Anglophone reader, Jew and non-Jew, owes it to him or herself to read Jews against Themselves. And every non-Anglophone country that aspires either to establish or maintain democracy owes itself a good translation. Rarely...

Thanks to the hard work of his literary admirers, an English translation of Grigory Kanovich’s autobiographical novel “Shtetl Love Song” has finally appeared. The novel was released by a boutique British publishing house, Noir Press,...

There is a romantic notion in popular Judaism that everyone has a bashert – a special person intended to become a lifelong spouse.  Sometimes, he or she may live just down the street; other times, you...

Author Bart Van Es knew about Lien de Jong, the Jewish girl who was provided a home and a new identity with his grandparents during the time the Nazis occupied Holland. However, after such...

For Steven Ross, an acclaimed American historian of labour and the film industry whose parents both survived the Holocaust, this remarkable and meticulously researched book is personal. Initially seeking to understand Jewish passivity during...