Jewish Review of Books

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

07/11/2024

Don't miss Allan Arkush's incisive review of Joshua Leifer's "Tablets Shattered." Arkush Writes:

"Leifer intertwines much of his historical narrative with personal recollections, but he wasn’t yet born at this time and can’t do so for the 1960s. I was, and my own memories don’t align very well with his reconstruction of events. The euphoria in June 1967 wasn’t just a burst of jingoistic glee at the sight of Jewish jets. It had much deeper causes than that."

Read more: https://tinyurl.com/3zej4pxr

04/11/2024

Stressed out by the election? Take a break from the news to read about the very first Jewish election: the anointment of King David. https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/1873/who-is-david/

28/10/2024

"Matisyahu might have seemed like a novelty act to Kimmel and friends, but Shake Off the Dust . . . Arise, the debut album he recorded while studying in a Chabad yeshiva, hit number four on the US charts and number one on the reggae charts. For a while, Matisyahu was American Judaism’s biggest star, with four albums in the top forty and global tours that brought him and his beard to Israel, Spain, Norway, Australia, and Japan. Twenty years after the release of his astonishing first album, Matisyahu, though in a very different incarnation, is still rocking."

Read "The Lion of Judah" by Akiva Schick https://tinyurl.com/ef6zbwj7

23/10/2024

Is Genesis all about Eve? Check out the link in our bio to find out.

23/10/2024

Is Genesis all about Eve?

What did Eve really want and what did Adam need?

21/10/2024

"I had participated Simchat Torah all my life, but the symbolic significance of dancing while holding the Torah and dancing while holding a child had not occurred to me until I thought deeply about the Central European minhag of binding the Torah with the baby’s circumcision cloth. Why were Torah and children paired? How did the central ritual object of Judaism become associated with the male child?"

Read Harvey E. Goldberg's full article here: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/torah/17216/of-torahs-and-children/

16/10/2024

What's the deal the etrogs? Take a look back through our archives to find out more about why we use this unusual fruit. Check out the link in our bio.