books -

Before ‘SNL,’ there was Sid Caesar — and a roomful of Jewish writers

December 26, 2025December 26, 2025Jesse Orine

Sid Caesar once dominated American television so completely that it was hard to imagine Saturday nights without him. In the early 1950s, his live sketch-comedy program “Your Show of Shows” drew tens of millions of viewers. That show and its other iterations — “The Admiral Broadway Revue,” “Caesar’s Hour” and “Sid Caesar Invites You” — […]

What Philip Roth taught me about my life as a Jewish man, despite his own imperfections

December 1, 2025December 2, 2025Jesse Orine

Sometime in 2011 or 2012, racing in a cab to pick up my kids from school, I passed Philip Roth on the corner of West 79th Street and Central Park West. At the edge of the urban paradise where I ran each morning to keep my sanity — just as I had heard daily swims […]

They had status, safety and power — and still chose to defy Hitler

November 23, 2025November 23, 2025Jesse Orine

Jonathan Freedland didn’t set out to write a guidebook to resistance. He was researching the story of Rudolf Vrba, the young Jewish escapee from Auschwitz who became the subject of his 2022 book, “The Escape Artist.” Freedland stumbled upon something odd: Heinrich Himmler, in an August 1944 speech, casually referred to a “reactionary cabal … […]

When Jews really did wage a ‘war on Christmas’

November 16, 2025November 16, 2025Jesse Orine

On a frigid winter’s day in 1906, tens of thousands of Jewish parents in New York’s Lower East Side and Brooklyn kept their children home from school. It wasn’t a snow day, but a protest: Activists and the Yiddish press had called for a boycott of the Christmas assemblies and pageants that they knew Jewish […]

Sam Sussman’s novel is about his Jewish mom and the teasing possibility that Bob Dylan is his dad

September 10, 2025September 10, 2025Jesse Orine

Sam Sussman’s debut novel, “Boy from the North Country,” revolves around a mystery: Was Bob Dylan, the singer and Nobel laureate, the narrator’s father? Sussman could have written this tale as a memoir, an expansion perhaps of the 2021 essay he wrote for Harper’s Magazine: “The Silent Type: On (Possibly) Being Bob Dylan’s Son.” His […]

Two middle-aged women defied the Nazis. One ‘wrote’ a book that betrayed the other.

March 9, 2025March 9, 2025Jesse Orine

There’s an ignoble tradition of falsified memoirs. “The Hitler Diaries,” a forgery published in 1983, fooled even a Hitler expert. “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years,” published in 1997, was sold as a survivor’s testimony but turned out to be a hoax (the part where the author was raised by wolves might have been […]

Restoring Palisades School Libraries, One Book at a Time

February 7, 2025David Rutman

Donate Hi everyone, As you may know, I’m the owner of Zibby’s Bookshop in Santa Monica, CA and a (part-time) Palisades resident who has been deeply affected by the fire. I’ve just finished organizing a pop-up clothing drive for 800+ families who lost their homes with items donated by 50+ brands. Now, I’m committing to rebuild the school libraries for four Palisades […]

Reviewing ‘Now You Are Here’ by Sarah Goldstein

April 6, 2024April 17, 2024Arsen Mayer

Sarah Goldstein’s mother, Leah Krupit, lived with Alzheimer’s disease for a quarter of a century. She survived more than twice as long, in some cases five times longer, than most people who are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease or another form of dementia. Bringing her mother to Israel and caring for her during her final years […]

Reviewing ‘Bummer’ by Marcus Burnstein

March 17, 2024March 17, 2024Arsen Mayer

The significance of the title of Marcus Burnstein’s book Bummer will, I am afraid, be lost on many readers born and raised in North America. Other Anglos – as we in Israel indiscriminatingly dub all English-speaking people – will get it. A “bum” in American English is something quite different from a “bum“ in British […]

‘THE ELEPHANT IN MY ROOM’: Helping Israeli kids cope with war – review

December 23, 2023December 23, 2023Arsen Mayer

Yael Walfish is a social worker based in Passaic, New Jersey. She wrote a therapeutic coloring book for children in Israel to help them cope with fear and trauma. The book is being distributed for free, with crayons, to displaced children in Israel, with versions in Hebrew and English. The Elephant in My Room is […]