Books

The ‘Middle’ Movement Affirms, Updates Its Middle Path

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 08 May 2012 19:19:00 +0000

Books

Diane Cole

Special To The Jewish Week

Ten years in the making, ‘The Observant Life’ charts a course for between ancient wisdom and say, Internet file sharing, for Conservative Jews.

What does it mean to be an observant Jew in the 21st century?

Conservtive Judaism Observant Life

Writing Between Worlds

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 01 May 2012 19:46:00 +0000

Books

Sandee Brawarsky

Jewish Week Book Critic

Life and art collide in the work of Israeli Arab novelist Sayed Kashua.

When I ask Sayed Kashua about the roots of his humor, he says that he isn’t sure, but that it probably has something to do with his discovery, as an Israeli Arab attending a Jewish high school, that humor could protect him.

Sayed Kashua

From Here To Absurdity

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 19:58:00 +0000

Books

Eric Herschthal

Staff Writer

The tortured (and hilarious) road to recovery of an up-and-coming comedian with a hair-raising biography.

Many of the best comedians have had deeply troubled pasts. But Moshe Kasher, a rising 32-year-old comic and author of a new memoir, “Kasher in the Rye,” takes the old adage to a new level.

memoir Moshe Kasher

Are You There God? It’s Us, The Jews

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 19:42:00 +0000

Books

Eric Herschthal

Staff Writer

Can religion, especially Judaism, work if you don’t believe in the Big Guy upstairs?

The latest turn in the New Atheist debates can be summed up like this: even if you don’t believe in God, religion still has a lot to offer. Public intellectuals like Alain de Botton and James Gray in Britain, and scientists like E.O. Wilson and Jonathan Haidt in America, all of them atheists, have made a similar case in their recent books and essays.

Athesism Judaism Religion Religion for Atheists

The (Piano) Keys To Her Survival

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 16:44:00 +0000

Books

Sandee Brawarsky

Jewish Week Book Critic

Centenarian Alice Herz-Sommer, the subject of two books, credits music with sustaining her at Terezin; other new Holocaust books also highlight women’s experiences.

At 108, Alice Herz-Sommer is believed to be the oldest living Holocaust survivor. Born in Prague, she watched her mother being deported to Terezin in 1942, and never saw her again. A year later, she was also deported there with her husband and son. By then, Herz-Sommer was an acclaimed pianist, and continued to play in the concentration camp, giving more than a hundred concerts to fellow prisoners and to the Nazis. Her husband was killed in the camp just before liberation.

Alice Herz-Sommer Beile Delechky book review Caroline Stoessinger Frank Buonagurio franz kafka Holocaust Melissa Muller Millie Werber Reinhard Piechocki Rochelle Saidel Sigmund Freud Vaclav Havel

Claude Lanzmann, Action Man

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 18:12:00 +0000

Books

George Robinson

Special to the Jewish Week

The maker of ‘Shoah’ looks at his own life, and all he did with his time.

To most Jewish Week readers, Claude Lanzmann is the man who directed “Shoah,” the nine-and-three-quarter-hour documentary about the murder of six million European Jews by the Nazis. Of course, if that were all he had done, Lanzmann would be worthy of admiration and study. As Franco-Jewish journalist Jean Daniel told him after one of the first screenings of the film, “This justifies a life.”

Claude Lanzmann

What We Talk About When We Talk About Passover

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 19:30:00 +0000

Books

Eric Herschthal

Staff Writer

In the Jonathan Safran Foer-Nathan Englander ‘New American Haggadah,’ tradition and modern literary sensibilities collide.

The novelist Jonathan Safran Foer grew up with a fairly typical American Passover. His father would use the Maxwell House Haggadah, supplemented with his own pamphlet of writings, and lead the annual Foer seder. But nine years ago, sitting at his family seder in Washington, D.C., Foer thought that, literary-wise, the Haggadah could use a little work.

Passover Safran Foer

Nathan Englander Comes Home To The Short Story

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:20:00 +0000

Books

Eric Herschthal

Staff Writer

After a novel and forays into playwriting and translations, the celebrated author returns to his specialty.

When Nathan Englander sat down for a recent interview at a hummus restaurant in the East Village, he had just come from the Public Theater. He was there helping stage a theater adaptation of one of his early short stories, “The Twenty-Seventh Man,” which will premiere at the Public in November.

nathan englander

Jewish Book Council Names Sami Rohr Prize Finalists

Dara Levin — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:12:18 +0000

Books

NEW YORK (JTA) – The Jewish Book Council announced its five finalists for the 2012 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

The $100,000 prize, presented annually since 2007, is awarded to fiction and non-fiction writers in alternating years, with this year’s focus on non-fiction.

Jewish Book Council

The Audacity Of ‘Hope’

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 20:35:00 +0000

Books

Eric Herschthal

Staff Writer

In his debut novel, Shalom Auslander takes on history and the Holocaust with his trademark darkly comic wit.

When Shalom Auslander, a lapsed Orthodox Jew, came out with his wickedly funny memoir “Foreskin’s Lament” in 2007, he was often mischaracterized as a New Atheist. It was clear he shared a similar disdain for religion with atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, but he never declared himself a non-believer.

Shalom Auslander

The Holocaust And 9/11: Universal Truths?

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 22:17:57 +0000

Books

Eric Herschthal

Staff Writer

The critical reception of the film version of ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’ brings to mind charges leveled against some Shoah works.

Perhaps it should be no surprise that some of the same criticisms that met Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel about Sept. 11, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” published in 2005, are now being leveled against the new film adaptation. Like the book, the film has drawn strong, often biting rebukes from critics who feel it exploits some of Sept. 11’s most harrowing images—the picture of the falling man leaping to his death, in particular—and universalizes a unique tragedy.

Masada, The Novel

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 17:48:00 +0000

Books

Diane Cole

Special To The Jewish Week

Alice Hoffman channels the panoramic history of the fortress through the first-person narrative voices of four women.

Masada: the very name of the towering mountain fortress overlooking the Judean Desert and the Dead Sea conjures images at once historic, mythic, and symbolic. King Herod built it between 37 and 31 B.C.E. as a royal refuge, and decorated it with splendiferous mosaics. But it is best known as the final refuge of 960 Jewish zealots who, in 73 C.E., committed suicide en masse, rather than succumb to a massacre by besieging Roman soldiers who were part of the army that had already quashed the Jewish rebellion and destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem.

Masada

Survival Instincts

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 21:24:00 +0000

Books

Eric Herschthal

Staff Writer

In ‘A Train in Winter,’ Caroline Moorehead explores the little-known story of French women in the Resistance, and what happened when the non-Jews were sent to Auschwitz.

In January 1942, French policemen began a special mission, in collaboration with Nazi officials, to arrest the local Resistance. On their list were dozens of women. They included Germaine Pican, a mother of two, who carried messages between communists in Paris and Rouen; Mai Politzer, a midwife, who dyed her hair black in disguise to type letters for the underground press; and Marie-Claude Vaillant-Coutrier, a photojournalist who wrote articles for a clandestine journal.

Auschwitz survivors Holocaust books

Eco Wades Into ‘The Protocols’ Conspiracy

Dani Shetrit — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 22:29:00 +0000

Books

Eric Herschthal

Staff Writer

Acclaimed Italian novelist defends his new book from attacks back home.

That “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the notorious anti-Semitic tract about a Jewish conspiracy to control the world, still has currency in parts of the world today was no deterrent for Umberto Eco. If there was anyone who could get away with a novel about the forged document’s creation, it was Eco. A towering member of Italy’s intellectual elite, he is a man as famed for his works on philosophy as he is for his best-selling novels.

The Wizardry Of Amos Oz

Lisa Shimabukuro — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 15:09:45 +0000

Books

Eric Herschthal

Staff Writer

In his latest meticulously crafted novel, Israel’s most famous living writer evokes a profound existential unease.

In Amos Oz’s new novel, or more accurately novel-in-short-stories, the sense of dread, of profound existential unease, is unmistakable. No character in Oz’s fictional Israeli village, Tel Ilan, where all the stories in “Scenes from Village Life” are set, is happy. No one is even remotely content with his lot.