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The Last Word
Nathan Abrams reflects on what he has learned about Stanley Kubrick from a new book of letters. Among Stanley Kubrick fans and scholars, author and screenwriter Frederic Raphael is well-known for having collaborated on the screenplay for that director’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut, which was released in 1999. He is also famous among them […]
Dreamlike and Hallucinatory
Shai Afsai on Reading Bruno Schulz. Years ago, there was a small bookshop on Thayer Street in Providence, Rhode Island, near Brown University’s campus, called College Hill Bookstore. It had late hours — I recall the shop being open until eleven p.m. on weekdays and until midnight on weekends — and its motto was: Dedicated […]
Who By Fire
Martin Elliot Jaffe recalls Leonard Cohen In The Sinai. “I was afraid at first that my quiet and melancholy songs weren’t the kind that would encourage soldiers at the front—but I learned that these wonderful kids don’t need glorious battle anthems—now between battles they don’t need glorious battle anthems. Now between battles, they’re open to […]
“You killed my Jew”
Donald Weber reviews a new book about author and artist Bruno Schulz. In Bruno Schulz: An Artist, A Murder, and the Highjacking of History Benjamin Balint re-visits issues he pursued in Kafka’s Last Trial, awarded the Sami Rohr Prize for 2020 by the Jewish Book Council. In each case, Balint’s subject is “the political implications […]
Little People
Excerpts adapted from Stephen Pogany’s Modern Times: The Biography of a Hungarian-Jewish Family. ‘You’re not a Jew!’ snaps my mother, with a sudden and unexpected rush of anger. For an instant, I’m confused, uncertain of what to say or what to think. Was I adopted? Have I been the victim of an elaborate, well-intentioned deception, […]
Soviet Jewish Writing
Donald Weber reviews a new book about postrevolutionary Russian and Yiddish literature and film. In How the Soviet Jew Was Made, Sasha Senderovich maps a fascinating landscape of Jewish literary expression in Eastern Europe between the Russian Revolution and the emergence of the Soviet Union. The ongoing horrific violence in Ukraine and – for perhaps […]
The Jewish mystical roots of His Dark Materials
The BBC and HBO recently aired the final episodes of the TV show His Dark Materials, based on the books of the same name by Philip Pullman, a self-described Church of England Atheist. When I first read the His Dark Materials trilogy 20 years ago, I knew the books were deemed as heretical. I read […]
An Unfathomable Nightmare
Donald Weber admires a new translation of Lion Feuchtwanger The Oppermanns. “Berlin is a city full of future émigrés,” Lion Feuchtwanger declared in 1931, prophesying his own fate two years before the 1933 publication of his deeply prescient novel, The Oppermanns. By then, the well-known author, a political novelist and playwright affiliated with Brecht and […]
Jewish Folk Medicine in Eastern Europe
Efram Sera-Shriar reviews a new book about Jewish Folk Medicine in Eastern Europe. Not so long ago I was having a discussion about traditional Jewish folk customs with my uncle, who is a lawyer. Like me, he’s always been interested in this aspect of Jewish culture, and we chatted about things such as the supposed […]
“No Jews were harmed”
Nathan Abrams reviews a new book about the work of the filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen. In a review about the Jewishness of the films of the brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, it would be far too easy to devote attention just to A Serious Man. This is their most obviously Jewish film and probably […]