Book Review | Building Community One Tile at a Time
At the Museum at Eldridge Street’s Egg Rolls, Egg Creams and Empanadas street festival—a celebration of Ashkenazi Jewish, Chinese and Puerto Rican communities held each summer (pre-pandemic) on New York’s Lower East Side—groups of Chinese Americans and American Jewish women play mahjong side by side, sometimes pausing to teach younger festivalgoers how to play.
Book Review | Waiting for the Messiah in Williamsburg
How did the Satmar Hasidim come to dominate the Brooklyn neighborhood known as Williamsburg?
Book Review | Greed, Drugs and Philanthropy
In this time of corrective unnamings—to remove traces of admiration or gratitude for the morally reevaluated—the names of unrepentant slaveholders, Confederate generals, contemporary sexual predators and other assorted wrongdoers have been erased or proposed for erasure from college dorms, military bases, city streets and more.
Book Review | A Writer Irreverent Even in Death
Even those familiar with the prolific English novelist and essayist Jenny Diski (1947-2016) don’t think of her as primarily a “Jewish” writer.
Book Review | Sifting Through Memory with Cynthia Ozick
Let’s get this part out of the way first: Antiquities is, by my count, Cynthia Ozick’s 24th book, and she is publishing it at the age of 92.
Book Review | The Dark Origins of Polish Revisionism
In February, in a case that made international headlines and provoked widespread condemnation, a court in Warsaw ordered two Polish historians of the Shoah to apologize to an elderly woman from the village of Malinowo for having “inexactly portrayed” her uncle Edward Malinowski, the village’s wartime headman.
Book Review | A Family in Pen and Ink
In the rise and fall of Hitler’s Germany, villains, victims and heroes figure profusely and are easily recognized.
Book Review | The Power of DNA, Dolls and Delis
Last month, The New York Times published a piece called “Saying Goodbye to Hanukkah.”
Book Review | Making Room for Ghosts
English readers of Yiddish literature in translation—and there are many—have long had access to the poetry of Avrom Sutzkever, whom translator and Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse called “the uncrowned Jewish poet laureate.”