Book Review // Trieste
Creating art from the events of the Holocaust remains as daunting as ever. Soon, those awful events will move beyond the reach of living memory while the need for testimony grows more pressing, not less. But the responsibilities of art are different from those of history: Theodor Adorno’s much-misrepresented dictum that “it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz” can simply be used as a lazy shorthand for refusing to engage with difficult and challenging creations.
Book Review // The Ambiguity of Virtue: Gertrude van Tijn and the Fate of the Dutch Jews
At the very beginning of his probing, disturbing account of the Nazis’ destruction of Dutch Jewry, Bernard Wasserstein asks what is no doubt the most terrible question that can be posed about Jewish behavior during the Holocaust: “Confronting the absolute evil of Nazism, was there any middle road between outright resistance and abject submission?”
Inside the Germany/Israel Relationship
In the wake of the Holocaust, Konrad Adenauer and David Ben-Gurion forged an unlikely partnership. More than 60 years later, Germany continues to be one of Israel’s staunchest defenders and most dependable allies. But can the relationship withstand the rising tide of anti-Israel sentiment in Europe and the fading memories of a new generation?
Book Review // The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe
The history of the Jews of Eastern Europe and Russia has a singular place in the Jewish imagination today. To some, it is a dead subject, poisoned by the Holocaust and the lethal anti-Semitism of the 19th and 20th centuries: Either we know everything we need to know about it or there is nothing worth knowing. To others, it is shrouded in the nostalgia-laden distance of the Old Country...
Book Review // Little Failure: A memoir by Gary Shteyngart
The title, Little Failure, is of course ironic. By now, after Gary Shteyngart’s three best-selling comic novels, many travel articles and dozens of interviews—in which he rarely gives a straight answer—his Russian Jewish immigrant parents must have forgiven him for not becoming the lawyer or accountant they envisioned. Or have they?
Book Review: A Child of Christian Blood, The Devil That Never Dies
Richard Bernstein reviews two new works on anti-Semitism by Edmund Levin and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.
Book Review: The Rise of Abraham Cahan
Reviewed by Jonathan Brent
Book Review | Country of Ash
Vivian Gornick reviews "Country of Ash: A Jewish Doctor in Poland, 1939-1945," by Edward Reicher
Travels with Pnin
In college, I made the ill-advised decision to join the cross-country ski team. Slow, given to daydreams, and so lacking any sense of direction that...
Jewish Word | Ghetto
Venice, Harlem and Beyond
There are few words that so acutely symbolize discrimination as “ghetto.” It was coined in Venice in 1516 to refer to a...
Shtetl Life Reexamined
By Symi Rom-Rymer
A picture is worth a thousand words, so goes the old cliché. But as Alana Newhouse’s recently published New York Times article on...