Review
Review
The Prophet with Eyes
In Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, based on the real life of a self-proclaimed Jewish messiah in 18th-century Poland, theological energy competes with the liberal novel’s finely wrought machinery.
Raphael Magarik
November 28, 2022
Review
Attention Must Be Paid
Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt expects us to shed fresh tears at a worn out conclusion.
Alisa Solomon
November 18, 2022
Review
A Pantomimed Reckoning
Forty years after the catastrophic invasion of Lebanon, the films of Israel’s “Lebanon Trilogy”—often understood as works of “anti-war cinema”—appear instead as efforts to sidestep accountability.
Hazem Fahmy
November 10, 2022
Review
Performative Utterances
In People Love Dead Jews and Jews Don’t Count, Dara Horn and David Baddiel inflame discourses that they claim to find disturbing.
Linda Kinstler
October 12, 2022
Review
Second Language
The Belarusian novel Alindarka’s Children, recently translated into Scots and English, considers the political stakes of linguistic inequity.
Yiyun Li
September 20, 2022
Review
Terms of Entry
Solmaz Sharif’s Customs probes the boundaries of the social to imagine a we on revolution’s other side.
Claire Schwartz
September 12, 2022
Review
World With No Escape
In his final novel, Last Times, Victor Serge achieved the ethical vision that sometimes eluded him in life.
Mitchell Abidor
September 7, 2022
Review
More Life
Couples Therapy seeks to portray not just particular couples but the fraught practice of coupledom.
Hannah Black
July 27, 2022
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
