Review
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
Review
The End of the World as We Know It
Three recent books reveal the potential—and the limits—of apocalyptic thinking.
Dan Sinykin May 26, 2021
Review
Lost and Unfounded
Will Kafka’s work survive the distorted representations made in his name?
Judith Butler May 3, 2021
Review
A City Without a Country
Mayor, a documentary about Ramallah mayor Musa Hadid, is a devastating satire of local governance under occupation.
Alex Yablon January 28, 2021
Review
Suburban Legends
Jason Diamond’s The Sprawl is a useful reminder that there is no single story to tell about the American suburbs.
Nora Caplan-Bricker December 14, 2020
Review
A Little Bit Nazi
Yishai Sarid’s new novel, The Memory Monster, is a bleak, brilliant reckoning with Israeli Holocaust memorialization.
Mitchell Abidor December 3, 2020
Review
Shelter in Place
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.
Bridget Bergin November 16, 2020
Review
A Compendium of Severance
Susan Taubes’s Divorcing traces the separation of a wife from her husband, a family from their homeland, and a people from their God.
Jess Bergman October 27, 2020
Review
Blueprint for Feminism
Feminist City helps us dream up alternative futures, even if it doesn’t do the dreaming itself.
Kristen Ghodsee October 14, 2020
Review
Shaping the Neo-Hasidic Canon
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.
Daniel Kraft September 17, 2020
Review
Revolution in the First Person Plural
In Social Poetics, Mark Nowak reclaims the poetry workshop as a space to imagine social transformation.
Philip Metres July 29, 2020
Review
Unorthodox Bodies
Through its unusually nuanced look at vaginal pain, the acclaimed Netflix series is a show about a Hasidic woman radicalized by disability.
Mari Cohen and Hannah Srajer July 14, 2020
Review
The More Things Change
Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham imagines the world exactly as it always was.
Andrea Long Chu July 8, 2020
