When Daniel Okrent first proposed writing a biography of Stephen Sondheim for the Yale Jewish Lives series, he had a warning for his publisher. “I would love to write about Sondheim if you’re interested, but I have to tell you that he was not in any way, in any remote way, a practicing Jew,” Okrent […]
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MADRID — More than 350 writers and other cultural figures have signed a petition defending the author Ariana Harwicz, who was disinvited from a literary festival in Spain over her support for Israel. The Jewish-Argentinian novelist, longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize, was scheduled to participate in a talk on Sept. 26 at […]
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On Saturday mornings in the 1960s and ’70s, instead of going to synagogue, I watched cartoons. Like millions of other American kids, I binged on “Fat Albert,” “The Pink Panther Show” and “H.R. Pufnstuf,” while absorbing endless commercial breaks for games, action figures, model kits and other marvels that might, if I played my cards […]
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“To be a liberal Zionist, it’s quite a lonely place,” said Amir Tibon, the Israeli journalist whose memoir “The Gates of Gaza” is one of the defining books of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. “Lonely” is relative, of course. Tibon’s story of how he, his wife Miri and their young daughters hunkered […]
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In the first episode of its second season of “The Bear,” Hulu’s acclaimed series, the character Richie describes damage at the titular restaurant as “the result of some failed Jewish lightning.” As far as antisemitic slurs go, that’s a pretty deep cut. “Jewish lightning,” for the uninitiated, is a derogatory euphemism for arson, based on […]
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Amir Tibon’s memoir about his family’s ordeal during the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and Laura Hobson Faure’s history of Jewish children who fled from Germany to France during World War II are among the finalists for the 2026 Sami Rohr Prize. The annual award — which alternates each year between works of fiction and […]
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Irish novelist Sally Rooney, who drew headlines in 2021 for refusing a Hebrew translation of one of her books, is now publishing her latest novel in Hebrew through an Israeli publisher approved by boycott activists. The Hebrew translation of “Intermezzo,” due out next month, will be published by November Books in collaboration with the left-wing […]
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Memoirs of leaving the Orthodox Jewish world have become a genre with their own familiar arc. The protagonist flees an oppressive religious world, is ostracized by family and former friends, and emerges into secular freedom — damaged perhaps, but liberated. Readers consume these books partly as anthropology, partly as self-help and, critics sometimes complain, partly […]
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Charlie Scheidt and Kat Rohrer met from opposite sides of the 20th-century moral universe: Scheidt is the only child of German Jewish refugees, raised in New York in a family haunted by what came “before”; she is the granddaughter of a committed Nazi soldier, raised in Austria amid an atmosphere of denial, silence and only […]
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At a time when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict feels perhaps farther than ever from a solution, Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon are offering something else: a story of hope. Inon, a Jewish Israeli, and Abu Sarah, a Palestinian Muslim, are on a media blitz for their new book, “The Future is Peace.” Inon’s kibbutznik parents […]
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