Book Review | Harvey Milk by Lillian Faderman
Last April, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to name the main terminal at San Francisco International Airport after Harvey Milk, the gay rights martyr who was assassinated 40 years ago. The decision further (and literally) cements Milk’s legacy as the best-known LGBT activist in American history.
Book Review | Gateway To The Moon by Mary Morris
Entrada de la Luna, New Mexico, is a small town with a big mystery. Why do its Spanish Catholic families light candles on Friday night? Why doesn’t anyone eat pork? The answers, it turns out, lie half a millennium ago, in 15th-century Spain.
Book Review | Yiddish for Pirates
Narrated by Aaron, a wisecracking 500-year-old African Gray parrot with a penchant for Yiddish puns, the book follows Moishe, a 14-year-old who yearns for adventure after discovering his father’s book of maps.
Book Review | Mapping the Bones by Jane Yolen
Although a work of fiction, Mapping the Bones has enough of a historical basis to make it read like a convincing survivor’s account, one that does the essential work of bearing witness to a tattered and bloody past.
Book Review | In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea by Michael Brenner
Brenner’s In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea chronicles the competing ambitions to preserve and nourish Jews and Judaism in safety, embraced by an array of Jewish thinkers and leaders from the late 19th century into the present. Would it be by assimilating into the dominant culture, as the Jewish German foreign minister Walther Rathenau argued?
Book Review | A History of Judaism by Martin Goodman
A History of Judaism
Martin Goodman
Princeton University Press
2018, 656 pp, $28.08
Surveys of religious literacy show that, as a group, American Jews do not know very much...
Book Review | In Days to Come: A New Hope for Israel by Avraham Burg
Zionism has always been a fiercely ideological movement. Socialist Labor Zionism gave rise to Israel’s Labor Party and to many of Israel’s best-known leaders, such as David Ben-Gurion, Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin.
Book Review | Eternal Life by Dara Horn
Dara Horn’s new novel, Eternal Life, imagines two characters who have made a sacred pact that consigns them to lives that will never end. Tethered to wearying and repetitive perpetuity, they cannot encounter the crossover from purpose to purposelessness that my mother-in-law experienced.
Book Review | What Is It All But Luminous: Notes from an Underground Man by Art Garfunkel
"I have these vocal cords. Two,” the singer Art Garfunkel writes near the start of his intriguing book of impressionistic musings about his life, “They have vibrated with the love of sound since I was five and began to sing with the sense of God’s gift running through me.”
Book Review // Debriefing: Collected Stories
Not long after the publication of her acclaimed 1992 historical romance The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag had dinner in a small Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal.
Book Review // When Basketball Was Jewish: Voices of Those Who Played the Game
In Farewell to Sport, published in 1938, the popular New York Daily News sports columnist Paul Gallico, when departing the world of sports to write fiction (The Poseidon Adventure later became one of his best-sellers), reflected on the wide variety of sports and sports figures he had covered.
Book Review | Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio
Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack. The Warner Brothers. Theirs was a family show, one for all and all for one.