Julia M. Klein, the Forward’s contributing book critic, has been a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Follow her @JuliaMKlein.
Julia M. KleinContributing Book Critic
By Julia M. Klein
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Culture America’s Jewish Women — From RG (Rebecca Gratz) To RBG
America’s Jewish Women: A History From Colonial Times to Today By Pamela S. Nadell W.W. Norton & Company, 336 pages, $28.95 In her swift-paced and concise history of American Jewish women, Pamela S. Nadell name checks all the usual suspects, from the Philadelphia philanthropist Rebecca Gratz and the poet Emma Lazarus to Betty Friedan and…
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Culture Jill Abramson Takes On ‘The Powers That Be’
MERCHANTS OF TRUTH: THE BUSINESS OF NEWS AND THE FIGHT FOR FACTS By Jill Abramson Simon & Schuster, 534 pages, $30 Jill Abramson brings a uniquely informed perspective to the question still obsessing the media world: What’s required for a news organization to survive in the face of a broken business model and the disruptive…
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Culture The Future Of Judaism Will Need A Big Tent
The Jewish American Paradox: Embracing Choice in a Changing World By Robert H. Mnookin PublicAffairs, 308 pages, $28 Robert H. Mnookin, who is a professor at Harvard Law School and chairs its Program on Negotiation, has gotten the “changing world” part of his subtitle right. Writing before last October’s deadly anti-Semitism-inspired attack on congregants at…
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Culture In ‘On The Basis Of Sex,’ A Reverential Portrait Of RBG
In the opening sequence of Mimi Leder’s feature film “On the Basis of Sex,” set in 1956, swarms of men in black and grey suits march toward what turns out to be Harvard Law School. Suddenly, among those drab masculine multitudes, we spot the back of a single woman in a blue dress: our heroine,…
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Art In Skokie, Memories Of Genocide Retold In Stories Of Everyday Objects
Objects and images, linking memory and history, are a mainstay of museum exhibitions. They are the embodiment of synecdoche, the part standing in for the whole. A photo album, a china set, a teddy bear — even the most quotidian of artifacts — all resonate with special poignancy when associated with stories of persecution and…
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Culture The Life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg — Strictly Scrutinized
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life By Jane Sherron De Hart Alfred A. Knopf, 752 pages, $35 Among the virtues of Jane Sherron De Hart’s magisterial and timely biography of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is that it prompts reflection on what it takes — for a woman in particular — to reach the…
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Culture Has Haruki Murakami Written His First Jewish Novel? Kind Of.
Killing Commendatore By Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen Alfred A. Knopf, 704 pages, $30 Around the time of the Anschluss, the 1938 Nazi takeover of Austria, a famous Japanese painter living in Vienna is entangled in an abortive assassination plot. His girlfriend, a resistance member, is captured, tortured and killed by…
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Culture From Phyllis Chesler, A Politically Incorrect Memoir Laden With Gossip And TMI
A Politically Incorrect Feminist: Creating a Movement With Bitches, Lunatics, Dykes, Prodigies, Warriors, and Wonder Women By Phyllis Chesler St. Martin’s Press, 320 pages, $27.99 Women of a certain age will remember Phyllis Chesler’s landmark book, “Women and Madness.” Her 1972 examination of how psychiatry failed women has never been out of print, as she…
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