Books

Folksong and its relatives, frequently popular responses to contemporary events, can offer fascinating insights into the lives of their composers and audiences. Vivi Lachs has…
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In his new graphic biography, The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth, Ken Krimstein imagines Hannah Arendt’s life, from her birth in Germany in 1912 to her death in…
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The poems of A. C. Jacobs have a steady pulse of displacement and exile, however responsively he locates himself at different points on what he himself described as his “sequences…
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Hannah Arendt was a thinker for dark times. The fundamental questions she posed – about freedom, violence, rights, authority, responsibility – exposed conflicts that others were…
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Very few novels offer the total immersion that the reader experiences with Zvi Jagendorf’s Coming Soon, set in a divided Jerusalem in 1961. You find yourself wandering the…
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Amos Oz, who died in December, once laid to rest the difficult definition of literary fiction. A thriller, he said, might be a day in the life of a Mossad agent, but literary…
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As we begin a new year, my iPhone is very keen I remember new years past. ‘You have a new memory,’ it tells me, insistently, like an automated pensieve conjuring up old dinner…
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Sara Yael Hirschhorn approaches the subjects of her book, City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement, with some sympathy. She wants us to see American-Jewish…
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One afternoon in 1980, the American writer Cynthia Ozick called on Gershom Scholem, the magisterial scholar of Jewish mysticism and messianism, then 83, at his home on Abarbanel…
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Going Into Town; A Love Letter to New York, by Roz Chast, multi-award-winning New Yorker cartoonist, was born of an attempt to explain the geography of Manhattan to her…
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