Arts & Culture | Books

The Reluctant Feminist

08/31/2012 | Eric Herschthal | Special To The Jewish Week | Books

The opening scene in Hanna Rosin’s 2010 Atlantic essay, “The End of Men,” may one day be as iconic as the beginning of Betty Friedan’s 1963 seminal work, “The Feminine Mystique.” Friedan’s book famously opened with a scene of a typical mid-century housewife.

One Searcher’s Highway To Heaven

08/14/2012 | Steve Lipman | Staff Writer | Books

Silver Spring, Md. — If, as President Kennedy famously said, “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step,” Eric Weiner’s journey of tens of thousands of miles began with a single question.

Coming Home, Moving On

07/31/2012 | Sandy Brawarsky | Book Critic | Books

The summer house in Lenox, Massachusetts where Joshua Henkin’s accomplished new novel is set has a tennis court out back, a garden, and, on its interior walls, street maps of Paris, Kathe Kollwitz etchings and faded portraits of great-grandparents. Family history also spills out of closets, with sports equipment of earlier eras, a never-worn wedding dress (the engagement was broken), outgrown sneakers and spare flip-flops.

‘Unnatural Jews’

07/25/2012 | Andrew Furman | Special To The Jewish Week | Books

“Nature, he couldn’t help noticing lately, was trying to scare the s--- out of him. F---ing with him.”

— from Shalom Auslander’s “Hope: A Tragedy”

Writing Her Way To A New Life

07/17/2012 | Sandee Brawarsky | Jewish Week Book Critic | Books

In an interview, Joy Ladin begins several responses, “When I started living as myself…” For the Stern College professor, poet and author, the boundary between then and now, between living a lie and leading an authentic life, is her transition from man to woman.

Past Imperfect?

06/26/2012 | Jerome A. Chanes | Special To The Jewish Week | Books

We Jews, traditionally, are an ahistoric people. That’s not to say that we don’t have a history; praise the Lord, we have plenty! But the rabbis of the Talmud did not see their job as doing history. For the rabbinic leaders and decisors of old, history was not front and center; the rabbinic leadership asked not “What happened?” but rather “How can we set a context, a chronological order, for the events in the Hebrew Bible and by extension for the halacha, the normative system that governs the life of the individual and the community?”