Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson
How did his mind work? What made him a genius? Isaacson’s biography shows how his scientific imagination sprang from the rebellious nature of his personality. His fascinating story is a testament to the connection...
Book Review: ‘An Unorthodox Match’
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...
Review of The Last Two Jews of Mogadishu: Living Under Al Shabaab’s Fire
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...
Yiddish Glossary for Goyim: The Power Shmoozer’s Guide to Hollywood
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...
Siberian Exile by Julija Sukys
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...
Jews against themselves by Edward Alexander
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...
The Miracle of the 2,000-Year-Old Date Seeds Brought Back to Life
SAN DIEGO — This book tells an amazing, true story about the Judean date palm that was thought to be extinct but was brought back to life thanks to two women scientists.
Six seeds were...
Grigory Kanovich’s Remarkable Love Song For a Lithuanian Shtetl
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,...
Tale of a Jewish girl hidden during the Shoah
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...
Rose and Max (z”l) Schindler relate their survivals
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...