The Magic of Alice Hoffman
The best-selling writer infuses her new novel on the Holocaust with Jewish legend—in the form of a rare female golem. "For me," she says, "literature and magic are kind of melded together."
LISTEN: Robert Siegel Interviews Susan Neiman
Robert Siegel spoke with Susan Neiman, author of Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil. Read the interview in our September/October 2019 issue here.
What America Can Learn From Germany
Monuments, holidays and patriotic anthems typically celebrate love of country and pride in national history, but since the end of World War II, Berlin has been an exception.
In ‘Quiet For Too Long,’ Solvej Schou Gets Loud
Solvej Schou is a Jewish musician, writer and feminist. Her art and politics are largely inspired by her family—particularly her grandmother, who was a Holocaust...
Judith Viorst Talks Nearing 90
At 88 years old, Viorst doesn’t fail to remind us how fiercely funny she is in her appropriately titled poetry collection: Nearing 90 and Other Comedies of Late Life.
Ira Forman in Conversation With Deborah Lipstadt
Deborah Lipstadt knows a lot about anti-Semitism, and she’s talked a lot about it lately, ever since her book Antisemitism: Here and Now came out right in the middle of the biggest public furor on the topic in years.
Interview | Ehud Barak: An Israel Without Hate
As Israeli elections near, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak speaks out about the meaning of Zionism, a one-state vs. two-state solution and the kind of leadership Israel needs
LISTEN: Robert Siegel Interviews Zachary Leader
Robert Siegel spoke with Zachary Leader, author of the new biography The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005, at a bookstore in Washington, DC. Bellow "has fantastic mimetic powers, imaginative powers," Leader says, "and he created a range of reference in his language that was new and more fairly American than the style of his predecessors." Read the full interview from our latest issue here.
Author Interview | Biographer Zachary Leader on Saul Bellow
With publication of the second and final volume of his monumental biography of Saul Bellow, Zachary Leader, a professor of English literature at the University of Roehampton in London, has completed a decade-long immersion in Bellow’s life and letters.
Author Interview | Judea Pearl
Does the rooster’s crow cause the sunrise? The answer seems obvious, if you’re a human—but a machine can only understand that the rooster’s crow and...
A German-American Artist Searches for a Cultural Identity
“How do you know who you are, if you don’t understand where you come from?” Nora Krug asks toward the beginning of her stunning visual memoir, Belonging: A German Reckons With History And Home.
On Being a Jewish American Writer in 2018
On November 12, Erika Dreifus presented the Creative Keynote Address at the 24th Annual Jewish American and Holocaust Literature Symposium in Miami.