Greenberg's View
Editorial cartoon: The hardened bunker
Editorial Cartoon REMOVE
Advertisement
 |
|
Advertisement
Author Page
Jonathan Kirsch
When the Stars Are in Alignment Above North Vermont Avenue
Himmler: An ordinary man turned villain
No matter how much is written about Nazi Germany, there is always some new horror to behold and some new paradox to ponder. That’s how I felt when I opened a remarkable and wholly fascinating new book by Peter Longerich, a German historian who is among the world’s leading scholars of the Holocaust and the Third Reich.
Fred Weintraub: The Serendipitous Producer
Fred Weintraub is not merely an eyewitness to the history of American pop culture. As we discover in his wholly winning memoir, “Bruce Lee, Woodstock and Me: From the Man Behind a Half-Century of Music, Movies and Martial Arts” (Brooktree Canyon Press: $28.95), he was a featured player.
Notable books of 2011
In addition to our prizewinner, we also want to honor some of the other exceptional books that came to our attention in 2011, each of which is accomplished and provocative.
‘What They Saved’ wins first Jewish Journal Book Prize
Since 2009, when I was first given the opportunity to serve as book editor and chief reviewer for The Jewish Journal, and thanks to the extraordinary vision and support of Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Rob Eshman and Executive Editor Susan Freudenheim, we have been able to significantly increase The Journal’s coverage of the literary world, including biweekly reviews in the newspaper and weekly reviews on jewishjournal.com. We also have created a book blog, 12:12, and we publish additional reviews by a group of esteemed authors and reviewers.
Pico Iyer unravels his mind’s shadows
Pico Iyer conjures up Graham Greene in the title of his new book, “The Man Within My Head” (Knopf: $25.95), and that’s why it caught my attention. Greene is a writer
whom I have read with admiration and pleasure, over and over again, throughout my adult life. Iyer, too, sparked my interest years ago with his travel memoir, “Video Night in Kathmandu,” and I have been following (and reviewing) him ever since.
In the beginning, there was Monterey
One way to mark the chronology of the counterculture, a pastime that is beloved by the baby boomers, is by reference to rock festivals. Woodstock and Altamont, for example, are now fully transformed into transcendent symbols of life and death, good and evil, the beginning and end of something. But the real starting point, the uber-festival, was Monterey.
A Holocaust Scholar Denounces Pols Who Pander to Jewish Voters
Books and Pastrami Sandwiches
Jerusalem, behind the veil of piety
Jerusalem is always in the headlines, or so it seems, but the same city on a hill has commanded the attention of the Western world without interruption since biblical antiquity.
A Rude Beast in the West Bank
A scholar reveals the Qur’an
No book is regarded with more fear and loathing in the West than the Qur’an, the fundamental religious text of Islam, and yet I am confident that most people who are anxious about what is written in the Qur’an have never actually held a copy in their hands, much less opened it and read it.
Ray Bradbury Enters a Brave New World
Israel’s ‘Unmaking’
No book review I’ve written for The Jewish Journal has prompted as much feedback as the one I wrote about “A New Voice for Israel” by Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder of J Street. His argument that Israel must make uncomfortable compromises and take dire risks in order to secure peace with the Palestinian Arabs is clearly unsettling to a great many Jews, both in Israel and America.
A gift for every reader
From novels to memoirs to movie reviews, and much in between, here are a few standout books for Chanukah gift giving.
God Has His Critics, and So Does Harold Bloom
Books: The J Street Zionist
“Israel’s existence is in fact threatened by a progressive, terminal illness,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, founder of J Street, writes in “A New Voice for Israel: Fighting for the Survival of the Jewish Nation” (Palgrave Macmillan: $26). According to his diagnosis, the illness is a kind of willful blindness that prevents both Israeli and American leaders from seeing a way out of the dire predicament that the Jewish state now faces.
The Mystery of the Missing Index
Spend Shabbat with the senator
A joke was told about U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman during the 2000 presidential campaign. Not only was Lieberman the first Jew to run for vice president, but he was a famously observant one. “If you elect Joe Lieberman,” the joke went, “he will be on the job 24/6.”
Exploring the mitzvah of social action
Among the gifts of the Jews, to use Thomas Cahill’s flattering phrase, perhaps none is more stirring and enduring than the biblical call to social justice. We are reminded of the Jewish injunction to seek justice in a couple of new books from Jewish Lights, each of which shows us how do more than pay lip service to one of the bedrock principles of Judaism.
Why the Germans fought to the bitter end
An insider’s view of Ariel Sharon
Ariel Sharon was a figure of controversy throughout his long career in war, politics and diplomacy, but no one can deny that he looms large in the making of the Jewish state.
Another One Bites the Dust
A guide to becoming Jewish
Jennifer S. Hanin was raised Catholic and converted to Judaism after marrying a Jewish man.
‘MetaMaus’ revisits, expands upon Pulitzer-winning graphic novel
Art Spiegelman shattered the conventions of comic books and Holocaust literature with the publication of “Maus,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel
The mirror of history
My first encounter with Jewish genealogy came when I was invited to give a talk at the annual meeting of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies on the question of whether any living Jew can plausibly claim to have descended from King David.
An insider’s view of also being an outsider
Sometimes I wonder if there isn’t a variant of Gresham’s law at work in the arts and letters of the digital age: Is bad writing driving out good? The sheer volume and velocity of the blogosphere, for example, seems to hide the moments of discernment and reflection.
Joseph Heller’s daughter gets the final word
As a rule, a novel speaks for itself and its author, but when it comes to Joseph Heller, we are privileged to have an especially intimate source of information about his life and work.
The gift Poland once offered
The long history of the Jews in Poland has been almost wholly eclipsed by the Holocaust. Fully half of the victims of German mass murder were Polish Jews, who numbered approximately 3.5 million on the eve of World War II.
Never enough of Calvin Trillin
Calvin Trillin, as we are reminded in “Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: forty years of funny stuff” (Random House: $27), has long served as a polestar in the American literary firmament.
Eclectic Fare Reflects L.A.’s Vibrant Lit Scene
Author tours are not what the used to be, and bookstore closings are reducing the number of venues where you can meet writers face to face. But the offerings for this fall season turn out to be remarkably rich, diverse and likely to prove memorable — an encouraging sign of the sheer vigor of the literary scene in Southern California.
Awakening to ‘Beasts’ of Hitler’s Berlin
Erik Larson attracted a loyal and appreciative readership — and that includes me — with his potent blend of social history and serial murder in the best-selling “The Devil in the White City,” a work of meticulous research that reads like a thriller. Now he puts the same skills to work in “In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin” (Crown: $26), an account of the early years of Nazi Germany as experienced by William E. Dodd, who served as U.S. ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1937.
One advocate’s argument for Israel’s longevity
When Hirsh Goodman speaks about the destiny of Israel, people listen.
Secrets of the Hebrew alphabet
“The letters of the Jews as strict as flames,” writes Karl Shapiro in the poem titled “The Alphabet,” “Or little terrible flowers lean/Stubbornly upwards through the perfect ages/Singing through solid stone the sacred names.”
To Every Thing There Is a Season
Moroccan murder mystery weaves web of deception
From the opening passage of “The Honored Dead: A Story of Friendship, Murder, and the Search for Truth in the Arab World” by Joseph Braude (Spiegel & Grau: $26), we suddenly find ourselves in an atmospheric scene right out of “Casablanca” — an empty alleyway in the storied Moroccan city, a morning mist, a warehouse where the deep silence is suddenly broken by a squad of soldiers and detectives, and the sight of a mutilated corpse.
A Make-Over for the Mad Monk
The Jewish story behind 264 netsukes
Memoir has come to be regarded nowadays as a highly corrupted literary form, but we are reminded of how rich and meaningful a memoir can be in “The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance” by Edmund de Waal (Picador, $16.00). First published in 2010 to great critical acclaim, the book is now available in a handsome paperback edition, and it’s nothing less than a treasure trove between covers.
From Pike to Greenberg to Koufax - Great Jewish Sports Heroes
So Passes the Glory of the World
Scientology: Secret no more
One advantage of starting a religion in antiquity is that Rolling Stone was not around to ask awkward questions about Moses or Jesus or Muhammad.
The Moral Route to Redemption
It’s hard to imagine a more timely book than “Confronting Scandal: How Jews Can Respond When Jews Do Bad Things” by Dr. Erica Brown (Jewish Lights: $24.99). The book comes too late for Bernie Madoff, but Anthony Weiner needs a copy, and so does DSK. Indeed, all of us who look on public scandals that involve Jewish figures as a “shanda far de goyim” — a shame in the eyes of the non-Jews — will find it fascinating.
Fried millipedes and life in China
The best way to tell if a city has a sizable Jewish population, as my father used to say, is by the number of good Chinese restaurants.
Wild Wild Left Coast
California is defined, both geographically and psychologically, by the fact that the state sits on the ragged edge of the continent — “an ambiguous portion of the whole state,” as Philip L. Fradkin puts it in “The Left Coast: California on the Edge” (University of California Press: $29.95), a superb work of art and text that seeks to understand what we really mean when we casually refer to “the Coast.”
Change and Stasis: The Ever-Evolving American Synagogue
Perhaps the single biggest surprise in “The Synagogue in America: A Short History,” by Marc Lee Raphael (New York University Press: $30), is its sheer entertainment value. Raphael, who holds the Nathan Gumenick chair of Judaic studies at the College of William and Mary, has produced a short, highly readable and wholly illuminating study that will delight anyone who has ever sat in shul and told himself the beloved old Jewish joke that ends with the punch line: “To that one, I never go.”
The Bible: What it says and means
Now that another presidential campaign season is upon us, you can count on a fair amount of Bible-thumping between now and election day. But if you wonder what the Bible really says about abortion, homosexuality, capital punishment and other contemporary concerns, the real answers are to be found in “The Bible Now” by Richard Elliott Friedman and Shawna Dolansky (Oxford University Press: $27.95).
David Mamet’s political manifesto explains the reformed liberal playwright
Let me say right away that I am an ardent and devoted fan of David Mamet. I have only a very small collection of movies on DVD, but two of them are “The Spanish Prisoner” and “House of Games,” both of which I’ve watched repeatedly. My wife, Ann, and I were in the audience for Mamet’s production of “Boston Marriage” at the Geffen and again when he produced a magic-and-memoir show featuring Ricky Jay.
Summer reads in all varieties
Some beloved and celebrated authors will hit the road in support of their latest books as this summer begins. Here are a few of the most intriguing titles and some of the places where their authors will be reading and signing their books in Southern California:
A skeptic looks at why we believe
Based on firsthand experience, I can say that if you find yourself in a room with Michael Shermer, he’s likely to be the smartest guy present, and I do not mean in the Enron sense. Shermer, author of “Why People Believe Weird Things” and “The Science of Good and Evil,” among other books, is the founder of Skeptic magazine, and a fearless and tireless advocate of rationalism in the face of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. And he brings a scalpel-sharp and laser-focused intelligence to his work as America’s arch-skeptic.
The art museums’ ‘Dirty Little Secret’
If you are looking for an international thriller for your summer reading, or a book about the art world, or a hard-hitting investigative report about law, business and finance, you will find all three in the pages of “Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museums” by Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: $28.00).
Advertisement
Current Print Edition
Advertisements
Advertisements
Featured Stories
Film
Who is that masked Jewish man? It’s Hero Man!
David Filmore is a mild-mannered filmmaker. A Shabbat-observant Jew from Australia who moved to West Hollywood 10 years ago, he spends his days focused on his production company, Plutonian Films. REMOVE
Calendar
Feb. 1-10
The 85-year-old comedy icon signs DVD copies of “The Jazz Singer,” the 1959 television remake that features Lewis as Joey Rabinowitz, a nightclub singer torn between show business and his faith. Wristbands will be distributed at 9 a.m., and Lewis will only sign copies of
Site Sections
Newspaper
Serving a community of 600,000, The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles is the largest Jewish weekly outside New York City. Our award-winning paper reaches over 150,000 educated, involved and affluent readers each week. Subscribe here.
© Copyright 2012 Tribe Media Corp.
All rights reserved. JewishJournal.com is hosted by Nexcess.net. Homepage design by Koret Communications.
Widgets by Mijits. Site construction by Hop Studios.
