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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Art How Jewish Athletes Defied Stereotypes Throughout History
Never Walk Alone: Jewish Identities in Sport At the Munich Jewish Museum Through January 7, 2018 The 1936 Berlin Olympics showcased the Nazi love of spectacle and buttressed the regime’s international legitimacy. To avert boycott threats, the government temporarily muted overt manifestations of its anti-Semitic policies, removing discriminatory signage and toning down newspaper rhetoric. But…
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Art How Henryk Ross’s Amazing Photos Unearthed The History Of Lodz — And Mine As Well
Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross At the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through July 30 The story of the Lodz Ghetto has become folkloric. Chronicled in novels such as Leslie Epstein’s “King of the Jews” and Steve Sem-Sandberg’s “The Emperor of Lies,” this was the place that the dictatorial Mordechai Chaim…
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Culture New German Monument Honors Gays And Lesbians Persecuted By Nazis
On June 27, the city of Munich unveiled its “Monument to the Gays and Lesbians Persecuted under the Nazi Regime.” The sidewalk memorial, commissioned by the city in 2011 and created by the German artist Ulla von Brandenburg, is a mosaic of colored concrete blocks that marks the site of a gay bar raided by…
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Culture One Author, Two Radically Different Holocaust Stories
Hell’s Traces: One Murder, Two Families, Thirty-Five Holocaust Memorials By Victor Ripp Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 224 pages, $25 By Julia M. Klein Victor Ripp, an American academic and author, is the descendant of two European Jewish families that met radically different fates. On his mother’s side, the Kahans, a wealthy clan skilled at the…
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Culture Facing Euthanasia, A WWII Survivor Relives Her Dramatic Life
The Longest Night By Otto de Kat Translated by Laura Watkinson MacLehose Press, 168 pages, $22.99 Emma, the sympathetic protagonist of Otto de Kat’s “The Longest Night,” is 96 and ready to say goodbye to her life. But first she will relive it, re-experiencing her emotions, debating her choices. A nurse is at her side,…
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Culture 100 Years Ago, Immigration Policy Was Just As Crucial — And Controversial
Two contrasting images in “1917: How One Year Changed The World,” at Philadelphia’s National Museum of American Jewish History, demonstrate the volatility of American attitudes toward immigrants.A World War I poster cautioning against food waste is also a hopeful narrative of arrival and assimilation. A cluster of immigrants gaze from a ship toward the Statue…
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Culture Brick By Brick, Architect Louis Kahn Gets The Biography He Deserves
You Say To Brick: The Life Of Louis Kahn By Wendy Lesser Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 416 pages, $30 The Estonian-born, Philadelphia-based architect Louis I. Kahn (1901–1974) remains a strong presence in his adopted city. Near his Washington Square West home, a pocket park bears his name. Residents still point out the Walnut Street office…
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Culture Why It’s Critical That We Demythologize The Holocaust
Why? Explaining the Holocaust By Peter Hayes W.W. Norton & Company, 412 pages, $27.95 The historian Peter Hayes has always derided what he regards as simplistic explanations of complicated phenomena. In his popular Holocaust lecture course at Northwestern University, he savaged Daniel Goldhagen’s argument, in “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” that a uniquely German “eliminationist anti-Semitism” caused…
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