Glenn C. Altschuler
By Glenn C. Altschuler
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Culture Skeletons in the Closet
Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret: By Steve Luxenberg Hyperion Books, 401 pages, $24.99 In a letter written on a yellow legal pad, placed in an envelope marked “Do not open until after my death,” Beth Luxenberg (née Cohen) directed that all her possessions be distributed equally among her children and grandchildren. She…
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Culture J’accuse America
Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters By Louis Begley Yale University Press, 272 pages, $24.00. Convicted in 1894 of selling secrets to Germany, French army captain Alfred Dreyfus, the only Jewish officer trainee on the General Staff, was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment in a fortified enclosure on Devil’s Island, a rocky formation near French Guyana. Six…
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Culture Einstein and Complex Analyses of Zionism
Judaism Does Not Equal Israel By Marc Ellis The New Press 232 pp. $24.95 Einstein on Israel and Zionism: His Provocative Ideas About the Middle East. By Fred Jerome. St. Martin’s Press. 334 pp. $25.95 ‘The Arabs have attacked us unexpectedly, wanted to destroy our settlement work, have murdered and plundered,” Chaim Weizmann wrote in…
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Culture Wunderkind Lost: Rosenfeld’s Passage From Home
Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing By Steven J. Zipperstein Yale University Press, 288 pages, $27.50. Born in Chicago in 1918, Isaac Rosenfeld was a wunderkind. he wasn’t even 20 when he collaborated with his buddy Saul Bellow on “*Der Shir Hashirim fun *Mendel Pumshtock,” a brilliant parody of T.S. Eliot’s “The…
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News Three Centuries of Bagels
The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread By Maria Balinska Yale University Press, 240 pages, $24. ‘A bagel has versatility,” Murray Lender, one of America’s great frozen-food entrepreneurs, proclaimed almost 40 years ago. “It’s a roll, a roll with personality. If you must be ethnic you can call it a Jewish English muffin…
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Culture Securing a Father’s Place In American Social History
Abraham Epstein: The Forgotten Father of Social Security By Pierre Epstein University of Missouri Press, 344 pages, $39.95. Throughout the 1930s, the home of Abraham and Henriette Epstein, at 389 Bleecker Street in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, was a salon where political reformers ate, drank and argued about how to provide social insurance for older Americans….
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Culture Haven in the Hollows
Coalfield Jews: An Appalachian History By Deborah R. Weiner University of Illinois Press, 264 pages, $60. Neither religion nor Yiddishkeit played a significant role in the life of young Harry Schwachter. A prosperous merchant in Williamson, W.Va., during the early 20th century, Schwachter ate fried apples and country-cured ham every Sunday morning. He “crashed the…
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Culture A Century Later, A Jewish Pioneer Gets His Due
Moses Levy of Florida: Jewish Utopian and Antebellum Reformer By C. S. Monaco Louisiana State University Press, 264 pages, $44.95. Moses Levy has waited more than100 years for his biographer. Levy died in 1854, virtually unnoticed. Pilgrimage, his utopian colony in Florida and the first Jewish communitarian settlement in the United States, was long gone…
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