Jewish Review of Books

18/04/2025

Tomorrow marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In 1948, the great Jewish writer Vasily Grossman wrote a testament to the memory of the Warsaw Ghetto—one that went unpublished for more than seventy years.

In the aftermath of destruction, Vasily Grossman saw redemption in a stocking maker carrying ashes back to Lodz.

08/04/2025

Demonic divorces, time traveling goats, and biblical visions that are out of this world: what else could it be but the new issue of Jewish Review of Books!

Escape Goat Jeremy Dauber Dara Horn's new graphic novel about a neverending Passover seder and a talking, time-travelling goat is great fun. It's also a deep meditation on Jewish history and memory.

20/02/2025

"Setting aside images of the evil carnival at Khan Younis and staring instead at the pictures of Shiri Bibas and her two boys, I thought of the line from Second Samuel."

Setting aside images of the evil carnival at Khan Younis and staring instead at the pictures of Shiri Bibas and her two boys, I thought of the line from Second Samuel.

12/02/2025

Émile Zola’s J’accuse...! might be modern journalism’s most famous headline. But whose idea was it? https://tinyurl.com/5dvhfasw

10/02/2025

"Émile Zola came late to the Dreyfus Affair. When his famous “J’accuse” appeared on the front page of the Paris newspaper L’Aurore in 1898, Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer wrongly convicted of treason, had already been imprisoned on Devil’s Island for three years. Nevertheless, with a single headline and in a single day, Zola managed to draw back the curtain on the years long spy scandal, uncovering motive and plot and naming names.

But it was not the first time that clear evidence of Dreyfus’s innocence had been published and not even the first time the words “J’accuse” had appeared in connection with the case. The arguments and phrasing that made “J’accuse” a journalistic masterpiece had been written years earlier by someone else—a Jewish author named Bernard Lazare."

—Read Lauren Gottlieb Lockshin on the Jewish journalist whose little-known contributions were critical to freeing Alfred Dreyfus.

Émile Zola’s J’accuse...! might be modern journalism’s most famous headline. But whose idea was it?

03/02/2025

"Though from a bourgeois, Anglo-Jewish literary background (my father is a novelist who is also considered the doyen of soccer writers), I had been drawn to the working-class world of football hooliganism in my early teens. This was after my parents transferred me from a privileged English school to a working-class one. My mother somehow perceived nonexistent parallels between newfangled state “comprehensive” schools in 1970s England and the German gymnasia she had grown up with.

"I was mercilessly bullied at the new school. My nose was broken, and I was repeatedly headbutted and had a flick-knife held to my throat. When a classmate told me to 'stop being Jewish with the ball,' I spat in his face."

Read Mark Glanville's full article about being a Jewish soccer hooligan.

https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/jewish-life/17942/ghosts-of-hooligans-past/

"When a classmate told me to 'stop being Jewish with the ball,' I spat in his face."

28/01/2025

"The destruction of the State of Israel has never been so popular. Murderous Hamas terrorists infiltrate the country, Iranian and Hezbollah rockets blanket the sky, student protestors call for intifada, and American Jewish writers turn the land over to welter and waste. Or a black hole. In Benjamin Resnick’s debut novel, Next Stop, Israel vanishes completely—swallowed up by a gaping maw termed “the anomaly.” Set twenty-odd years after this apocalypse, smaller anomalies now speckle the world, sending countries spiraling into crises and exerting a strange pull on Jews, some of whom pass through the holes to a mysterious other side."

Read Akiva Schick's full review of Next Stop.

American Jewish novelists have been writing about Israel for decades, but the surprising impulse to destroy it is relatively new.

27/01/2025

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. It’s been 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz. We are rereading Dara Horn’s devastating reflection on the diary of Zalmen Gradowski, a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz.

Horn writes, “If you haven’t read the work of Zalmen Gradowski, I can confidently say that you, like the students across America learning about happy upstanders, know little about the actual experiences of Jewish victims (rather than survivors) of the Holocaust."

Dara Horn explores the Holocaust memoir you’ve never heard of that you must read now.

22/01/2025

Get your copy of the winter issue of the Jewish Review of Books! https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/issue/winter-2025/

21/01/2025

"Theodor Adorno said there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, but he didn’t say anything about buddy movies, which, I guess, is an argument in favor of A Real Pain. The film follows two cousins, anxious, fussy David (Jesse Eisenberg, who wrote and directed the film) and the appealing but erratic Benji (Kieran Culkin in a lucid, sincere performance), who go on a heritage tour of Jewish Poland after the death of their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor.

The cousins’ trip will take them to monuments to Jewish and Polish resistance, an old Jewish cemetery, a kitschy kosher-style restaurant, cities where Ashkenazi Jewish culture once thrived, and Majdanek, where it was brutally and systematically extinguished. As a coda to the organized trip, they will visit the house their grandmother grew up in."

Read Emil Stern's full of :
https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/holocaust/17939/the-big-schlep/

19/01/2025

Why has TikTok become a hotbed of anti-Israel and antisemitic content, and what does it tell us about brewing global conflicts.

Why has TikTok become a hotbed of anti-Israel and antisemitic content, and what does it tell us about brewing global conflicts.

16/01/2025

"The translation of za’ava as “diaspora”did not reflect a historical reality so much as it polemicized against it. Why, then, did the authors of the Septuagint associate divine anger with dispersion? The answer to this question lies in events that took place three centuries before the Septuagint was composed."

—Read Malka Z Simkovich's essay on the origins of diaspora. https://tinyurl.com/2y26f6uz

15/01/2025

Novelists destroying Israel, a critic unicycling his way through life, Saul Bellow's stroll through Jerusalem, and a soccer hooligan with a Yiddishe kop. Where else could you find all of this but the latest issue of the Jewish Review of Books?

Boy Meets Girl Meets Apocalypse Akiva Schick American Jewish novelists have been writing about Israel for decades, but the surprising impulse to destroy it is relatively new.

30/12/2024

"Chabad’s campaign of public menorah lightings began in San Francisco, in 1975. Two local Lubavitcher rabbis, Chaim Drizin and Yosef Langer, met with the program director of the local public television station and Bill Graham, San Francisco’s famous Rock and Roll impresario (and Holocaust survivor, born Wulf Grajonca in Berlin), and came up with the idea of erecting a twenty-five-foot-tall mahogany menorah in Union Square on Hanukkah. Although the menorah has returned to Union Square every year since then (along with the eighty-three-foot-tall Macy’s Christmas tree), its shape—giant bent L-shaped arms emerging sideways and then upwards from a center column­—is now unique in the vast landscape of Chabad menorahs. Just a few years later, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, established the now-iconic Chabad menorah: eight straight arms, pointing upward diagonally, four on each side, emerging from an unadorned central pole. This austere figure is now familiar from hundreds of public lightings around the globe. Like some other Chabad traditions, it seems to be a charming ritual idiosyncrasy until, beneath the surface, you discover a grave point of doctrine."

Read Reviel Netz's insightful article, "Straightening Out the Menorah" here: https://tinyurl.com/2rr2myfx

18/11/2024

"One day when I was young and easy under the red-roof tiles and as happy with my growing family as the Hollywood Hills were green (when you could see them through the smog), I walked up to the corner of Sherbourne and Pico on some small errand and ran into a guy I’ll call Charles. We weren’t exactly friends, but we’d met the previous year in Jerusalem. He was a grad student in a prestigious humanities program (a status to which I aspired) and the first person I’d ever heard use the word “problematize” in more or less casual conversation. I tried to avoid him, but he walked straight up to me. 'Well,' he said, 'this is a good little golus you’ve got here.'”

Read Abe Socher's "A Good Golus" here: https://tinyurl.com/8rfawtjh

11/11/2024

Emil Stern wrote about his visit to the confused and confusing Jewish exhibit at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures:

"When the exhibit launched in May, its curator exulted that it was even better than it would have been had it been part of the museum’s opening. Anticipation was high. But then some attendees read the wall text and noted the use of words like “predator,” “tyrant,” “frugal,” “womanizer,” and “oppressive” in describing the Jewish moguls. It was, an open letter noted, “the only section of the museum that vilifies those it purports to celebrate.” They had a point. I had been to the museum last year to see Regeneration: Black Cinema, 1898–1971, which was sensational, but I could not recall learning a single thing about anyone’s vices or proclivities."

Read Stern's full review here: https://tinyurl.com/ye23d8bx