Lechaim!
Back in the 1960s, the Rheingold Corporation ran a bunch of TV commercials—mostly during baseball games, if I remember correctly—vaunting the popularity of its beer among all sorts of minority…
Sephardi Soap
With the runaway success of the novel The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, a television adaptation was all but inevitable, and the decision of Yes Studios to invest record amounts of cash in the show, while eyebrow raising, is also unsurprising.
It’s a Novel: An Exchange
A couple of weeks ago, Allan Arkush wrote that it was “hard to even list all the things . . . that ring false,” in Joshua Cohen’s widely praised new novel. The author vehemently defended himself on both literary and historical grounds against what he called “a review like a pogrom.”
Fictional Revisionism
The first time I picked up Joshua Cohen’s new novel, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, I put it down when I reached page eighty-four.
No Less Lost
The past can be exhilarating, and it can be quicksand. So discovers Menachem Kaiser in Plunder, his expansive, complicated, generous memoir.
These Heroic Girls
On Christmas Eve, 1941, three young Jewish women spent the evening in the company of Nazis, secretly gathering intelligence on behalf of the underground Jewish resistance.
“Wherever You Go, I Will Go”: Reading Ruth 1:16-17
It is traditional to read the book of Ruth on Shavuot. Leon Kass has been reading it with his granddaughter, and the result is a new book.
Forging an Identity
How did a young Sephardi polyglot from Constantinople transform himself in Mexican society?
Revisiting Hill 24
The first movie I ever saw, not counting Dumbo, was Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer, a landmark black-and-white film about Israel’s War of Independence . . .
Let the People of Israel Remember
The earliest literary commemoration of Zionism’s fallen heroes was a book entitled Yizkor, published in Palestine in 1911 by members of Poalei Zion (Workers of Zion).