Review

Against Impossibility

Who benefits when we decide—or accept—that the splinters of history are “beyond repair”?

Helen Betya Rubinstein June 21, 2022

Review

The Family at Breakfast

Mona Mansour’s Vagrant Trilogy put a subtle, unapologetic portrait of a Palestinian life on a major New York stage.

Ben Gassman June 10, 2022

Review

An Object Not Meant to Object

On The Wayland Rudd Collection

Zoé Samudzi June 6, 2022

Review

Why There’s No Such Thing as a Jewish Gaucho

The Murders of Moisés Ville examines the violence lurking beneath tales of a Jewish utopia in rural Argentina.

Lily Meyer May 10, 2022

Review

How Hollywood Wrote the Story of Israel

A new history misunderstands the American film industry’s role in cementing the US–Israel relationship—and the part Hollywood has played in scripting the tales both states tell about their settler-colonial origins.

Hazem Fahmy April 26, 2022

Review

World War II Revisionism at the Jewish Museum

A new exhibition about Jonas Mekas was an opportunity to confront his wartime record. Instead, it tells a familiar story.

Michael Casper April 21, 2022

Review

Fables of Finitude

In Pure Colour, Sheila Heti asks what it would mean to love the stories that link us to the past without imagining that they will carry us into the future.

Nora Caplan-Bricker March 14, 2022

Review

The Overlooked Loyalties of Ethel Rosenberg

A new biography of the martyr captures the texture of her life and times but fails to fully investigate her political convictions.

Mitchell Abidor March 2, 2022

Review

Biographical Fallacy

In a new biography of Judah P. Benjamin, a Southern Jew who served in the Confederate government, one man’s life can tell us only so much about the American Jewish encounter with slavery.

Richard Kreitner February 3, 2022

Review

Survivor’s Guilt

In his Novi Sad trilogy of post-Holocaust fictions, the Serbian novelist Aleksandar Tišma examines the psychologically warping effects of antisemitism.

Jess Bergman December 14, 2021

Review

The Making of Satmar Williamsburg

In a new history of the Hasidic “fortress in Brooklyn,” a community’s struggle for the right to the city is not always waged in the common interest.

Samuel Stein November 23, 2021

Review

Bad Education

In The Loneliest Americans, Jay Caspian Kang suggests that for Asian Americans, the process of political consciousness raising has gone terribly wrong.

Zoe Hu November 17, 2021

Review

Trick of the Light

In a film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s Passing, racial passing is about seeing as much as being seen.

Adrienne Brown November 15, 2021

Review

That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore

In The Netanyahus, Joshua Cohen tries and fails to reanimate the canonical Jewish American novel.

Nathan Goldman September 29, 2021

Review

What the Record Doesn’t Show

By offering the group as a model for present-day politics, Sarah Schulman’s history of ACT UP reproduces the movement’s failures and exclusions.

Vicky Osterweil September 22, 2021

Review

Portraits of Empire

George W. Bush’s recent book of paintings betrays liberal empire’s role not as fascism’s alternative but as its co-conspirator.

Claire Schwartz September 10, 2021

Review

The Guilty Conscience of Jewish Empire

In The Wondering Jew, the influential Israeli philosopher Micah Goodman—who has argued for “shrinking” the occupation—contends that liberal Judaism requires maximalist Zionism.

Daniel May June 28, 2021

Review

Eternal Return

In Natalia Ginzburg’s fiction—including three recently reissued works—painful things cannot be put off forever.

Jess Bergman June 18, 2021

Review

Who Owns American Judaism?

Lila Corwin Berman’s new book traces the explosion of the American Jewish philanthropic sector over the past 70 years—and its corrosive effect on contemporary Jewish life.

Raphael Magarik June 1, 2021