Dara Horn
Dara Horn is a scholar of Hebrew and Yiddish literature and the author of five novels, most recently Eternal Life (W.W. Norton & Company, 2018).
Come Here to Me, You Fortunate Citizen of the World
Zalmen Gradowski’s testimony makes the sadism of the Nazi enterprise painfully clear. That seems obvious, but it runs counter to most Holocaust education.
Storytelling, or: Yiddish in America
The basic recipe of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s later novels called for a guy with two wives or lovers who ping-pongs between them for a couple of hundred pages and then runs away. And yet this new collection of Singer’s essays, reminds us that he was not only a great storyteller, but a great champion of the importance of stories for art and for life.
The Allure of Dead Jews: A Conversation with Dara Horn
Prizewinning novelist Dara Horn has a new book of essays out, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. Horn joined JRB editor Abraham Socher for a conversation on October 14, and you can watch it now.
Do Jews Count?
I would never have said this ten years ago, or even five years ago, but there apparently comes a time in the lives of those who write about Jewish identity when they have to decide whether to write about . . . it.
Who Doesn’t Love Roald Dahl?
There’s nothing quite like the realization that what you thought was an empowering work of art is actually a 200-page exercise in trolling. It took me more than 30 years to figure out that I’d been trolled by Roald Dahl.
Romania!
“I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians” is a reenactment; the quotation marks are part of its title, suggesting just how meta this film becomes. It steps back one more level into the minds of the people doing the reenacting.
Yiddish Heroism, Hebrew Tears
For Avraham Sutzkever, life and work were not even slightly separate, since his was a life not merely shaped by poetry in a metaphorical sense but literally saved by it, when a poem of his produced an airplane.
18 Questions with Dara Horn
Dara Horn’s new novel, Eternal Life, is out today. We caught up with her and asked her 18 questions.
Cynthia Ozick: Or, Immortality
Ozick is as marvelously demanding, harrumphing, and uncompromising as she has always been.
Playing the Fool
Of the many varieties of anti-Semitism, or anti-Judaism, that have plagued the Jews over the centuries, two recurrent general patterns can be identified by the holidays that celebrate triumphs over them: Purim and Hanukkah.
The Vanishing Point
A new exhibit explores the vanished world and unseen photographs of Roman Vishniac.
Pro-Creation
Economist Bryan Caplan thinks parents “overcharge” themselves when it comes to investing in their children. Glückel of Hameln knew better.
Jacob Glatstein’s Prophecy
Literary masterpieces that double as works of prophecy have been rare since the death of Isaiah. But the Yiddish poet Jacob Glatstein wrote two novellas that foreshadowed the future of Jewish Europe.
Animal Foible
The author of Life of Pi trivializes the Holocaust.
Requiem for a Luftmentsh
Were Saul Bellow and his friend Isaac Rosenfeld the last Jewish intellectuals of their kind?