Arts & Culture | Books

Darkness After ‘Noon’

01/22/2010 | Eric Herschthal | Staff Writer | Books

If you were Jewish and lived in the 1940s, to say that Arthur Koestler was on your side was no small thing. Then at the height of his renown, Koestler, born in Budapest in 1905, had become one of Western literature’s most revered figures. His anti-Stalinist novel “Darkness at Noon,” published in 1940 and still his most famous, made him one of the first liberals to come out against Communism. The book would partly inspire George Orwell, an author whose reputation today far eclipses Koestler’s.

What Accounts For German Fascism?

01/15/2010 | Eric Herschthal | Staff Writer | Books

Though Michael Haneke’s recently released film “The White Ribbon,” which won the prestigious Palme d’Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival, focuses on one small German village, in 1914, the director has made it clear that the issues it raises are much larger. “Why do people follow an ideology?” the director asks in the film’s official press release. “German fascism is the best-known example of ideological delusion,” he adds, and while his film is not an explanation of German fascism per se, he certainly encourages viewers to ponder the relationship. In the opening scene, the narrator even says that he hopes the story about to unfold might “clarify things that happened later in our country.”

East of Auschwitz

12/23/2009 | Eric Herschthal | Staff Writer | Books

Every few years a poll comes out showing how little the general public knows about the Holocaust: in 2005, a poll found that only 40 percent of Canadians could correctly identify the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust, while one in six thought the number was less than a million. A BBC poll that year revealed that half of Britons had never even heard of Auschwitz.

The Jewish Mother Teresa?

12/16/2009 | Steve Lipman | Staff Writer | Books

In Calcutta four years ago on a visit to one of the festering slums he calls a “hell on earth,” best-selling journalist-turned-altruist Dominique Lapierre was speaking with another writer, who knew of the Frenchman’s interest in heroic figures.

“Do you want to meet a South African Mother Teresa?” the writer asked.

Lapierre, who knew the renowned Saint of the Slums, winner of a Nobel Peace Prize, learned that day about Helen Lieberman.

The Jewish Agenda is Jewish, Not Liberal

10/09/2009 | Jerome Chanes | Special to the Jewish WEek | Books

The publication of Norman Podhoretz’s “Why Are Jews Liberals?” (Doubleday) has been greeted more by yawns than by expressions of gratification or of outrage. Podhoretz, for many years the editor of the erstwhile liberal and more recently neocon Commentary magazine, walks the reader through Jewish history and comes up with an entirely non-startling conclusion: Jews are “liberal” because throughout the millennia we received our only support from universalist ideas, wherever they could be found.