Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of books and literature, including both non-fictional and fictional works.
Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of books and literature, including both non-fictional and fictional works.
Books
The Latest
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News Love in the time of the Spanish Inquisition: A Q & A with Cambria Gordon
Cambria Gordon’s family sabbatical in Madrid in 2016 became more than a time away from her native Los Angeles. Gordon felt her identity — as a writer and as a Jew — blossom. She launched into a journey of research and inquiry that led to the writing and publication of her new young adult novel,…
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Culture ‘This man is not going to daunt me:’ Talking with Philip Roth’s biographer, Blake Bailey
Editor’s note: Two weeks after this interview with Blake Bailey was published, multiple women came forward to accuse him of sexual assault and other sexual misconduct. Details of the allegations may be found here. A masterful writer obsessively preoccupied with whether and how he’d be valued by history; a deeply sensitive charmer with a real…
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Culture Farewell to Norton Juster, who guided generations of readers through ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’
Milo, the protagonist of “The Phantom Tollbooth,” may be just ten years old. But readers may recall he experiences a very grown-up brand of ennui. “Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he’d bothered,” we learn of Milo in the first pages of the children’s…
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Culture “Golem Girl” captures life of imagination and disability culture
When artist Riva Lehrer was a child, Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” deeply resonated with her. Her association with the legend was understandable—Lehrer was born with spina bifida, a condition when the spine and spinal column do not fuse in utero. Lehrer was born in 1958, when 90% of children with spina bifida did not survive. It…
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Culture You’ve probably never heard about the world’s first female rabbi. Sigal Samuel wants to change that
If you think female rabbis are a modern phenomenon, Sigal Samuel is here to change your mind — just like she changed hers. Samuel grew up in an Orthodox community where the idea of female clergy was considered deeply untraditional. So when, deep in an “internet rabbit hole,” she stumbled on the story of the…
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Yiddish World Yiddish culture barely touched upon in ‘The New Jewish Canon’
Read this article in Yiddish What were the most important Jewish texts of the last 40 years? What did the Jewish opinion-makers have to say about the most important issues of Jewish survival? Yehuda Kurtzer and Claire Sufrin attempt to answer these questions in a collection of 70 selected documents called “The New Jewish Canon:…
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Culture Nicole Krauss’s debut short story collection is an argument against staying calm
“To Be a Man” By Nicole Krauss Harper, 240 pages, $21.59 Noa, the teenage protagonist and narrator of Nicole Krauss’s short story “End Days,” wakes up with two disasters on her mind: the wildfires that have just “jumped the borders” into Los Angeles, where she lives, and her parents’ impending divorce. Compared to one couple’s…
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Culture In Nessa Rapoport’s ‘Evening,’ the sun sets on a complicated sisterhood
Midway through “Evening,” Nessa Rapoport’s second novel, two teenage sisters stand in the bathroom, squabbling. Eve is readying herself for a date with Laurie, an older boy who happens to be a friend of her sister, Tam, and Tam is scolding her: For the steam with which she’s filled their bathroom, the perfume she’s sprayed…
Explore
Most Popular
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Fast Forward Why neo-Nazis marched in Ohio this weekend, and almost every weekend in the US
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Opinion The group behind Project 2025 has a plan to protect Jews. It will do the opposite.
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Opinion Just about every interpretation of Trump’s narrow election victory is wrong
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News Texas schools want to add Queen Esther to the curriculum. Here’s why Jews (and many Christians) are opposed.
In Case You Missed It
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Fast Forward Three arrested in murder of rabbi in United Arab Emirates; Israel denounces ‘despicable antisemitic act’
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News Trump promised peace in the Middle East. Will his 2020 plan be the blueprint?
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Fast Forward Rep. Ritchie Torres, outspoken pro-Israel advocate, is dropping hints that he could run for NY governor
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Fast Forward Ursula Haverbeck, infamous German Holocaust denier known as ‘Nazi grandma,’ dies at 96
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