Review

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Three recent books reveal the potential—and the limits—of apocalyptic thinking.

Will Kafka’s work survive the distorted representations made in his name?

Mayor, a documentary about Ramallah mayor Musa Hadid, is a devastating satire of local governance under occupation.

Jason Diamond’s The Sprawl is a useful reminder that there is no single story to tell about the American suburbs.

Yishai Sarid’s new novel, The Memory Monster, is a bleak, brilliant reckoning with Israeli Holocaust memorialization.

Malicroix—a 1948 French novel about a man who has isolated himself in a house to fulfill the strange terms of his inheritance—resonates uncannily with our contemporary experience of quarantine.

Susan Taubes’s Divorcing traces the separation of a wife from her husband, a family from their homeland, and a people from their God.

Feminist City helps us dream up alternative futures, even if it doesn’t do the dreaming itself.

A New Hasidism, a recent two-volume anthology, offers a compelling alternative to mainstream Jewish spirituality, but fails to fully confront the tradition’s consequences in the world.

In Social Poetics, Mark Nowak reclaims the poetry workshop as a space to imagine social transformation.

Through its unusually nuanced look at vaginal pain, the acclaimed Netflix series is a show about a Hasidic woman radicalized by disability.

Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham imagines the world exactly as it always was.

The recent TV adaptation of The Plot Against America rejects Philip Roth’s vision of American exceptionalism.

When We Were Arabs does little to expand the political possibilities for a younger, American Mizrahi milieu.

The new season of Fauda takes the denigration of Palestinians to new depths.

Anna Wiener’s memoir of her time in San Francisco tech subtly skewers the industry, but its elegantly disaffected style has its limits.

The vexing uses of the metaphorical Jew in Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance.

In Serotonin, Michel Houellebecq maps the degradations of neoliberal notions of “progress” and “free trade” directly onto sexual politics.