It is telling that the chapter titles in Neal Gabler’s “Barbra Streisand: Redefining Beauty, Femininity, and Power,” the latest book in the Jewish Lives series from Yale University Press, are given in transliterated Yiddish (and sometimes Yinglish) — “Shaynkeit,” “Mieskeit,” “Chutzpah,” “Tsezingen Zikh,” and so on.
Dr. Joel E. Dimsdale is a psychiatrist who has long specialized in the “coping behavior” of concentration camp survivors.
When it comes to the Middle East, and especially the city of Jerusalem, everything in the built environment has a significant historical subtext, as we are eloquently reminded in “Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City” by Adina Hoffman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a superb and sharp-eyed account of “burials, erasures, and attempts to mark political turf by means of culturally symbolic architecture and hastily rewritten maps,” as Hoffman puts it.
The largest book festival in the United States will reprise on the USC campus this weekend, April 9 and 10, when the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books has its 21st edition.
As I muse over my experiences at the AIPAC 2016 Policy Conference, the thought occurs to me that one’s first AIPAC is something like a first visit to a mikvah – a totally immersive Jewish experience.
According to a pious tradition, the unmarried men in a yeshivah were asked to leave the study hall whenever the rabbi began to teach one of the passages of the Talmud that frankly address the subject of sex, an act known in talmudic usage as “the mitzvah act.”
Moscow-born author and journalist Paul Goldberg first learned about the so-called blood libel — the hateful lie alleging Jews use Christian blood in their rituals — in a place where slander against the Jews is deeply rooted.
The voice of Marvin Kalb, deeply familiar to any baby boomer, is calm, measured and authoritative.
Exactly 100 years have passed since the first Jewish jurist was named to the Supreme Court.
Herman Wouk is one of our living masters, the author of “Marjorie Morningstar,” “The Caine Mutiny,” “This Is My God” and other novels, plays and works of nonfiction.
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