Ayelet Waldman makes up half of one of America’s most prolific Jewish literary couples. (She is married to Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon.) Her most recent novel, “Red Hook Road,” is the story of two tragically intertwined families: the Jewish Copakens, from New York, and the Yankee Tetherlys of Maine, led by matriarchs Iris and…
Robert Alter discussed “tough Jews” with Michael Chabon on March 18 as part of the Berkeley Seminars in Modern Jewish Culture Lecture, but there seemed to be a gap in the Jewishness. Alter, the Berkeley professor and great critic of Jewish writing, interviewed the Pulitzer Prize-winning Chabon and asked about the author’s exuberant style, the…
This weekend, The New York Times Book Review, which has a real knack for hiring known anti-feminists as writers, featured Katie “Rape, shmape” Roiphe’s essay on literary sex in the works of Great Male writers. The essay bemoans the supposed sissiness of today’s male novelists, such as Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace and…
The best-selling, Pulitzer-winning, famously Jewish author, Michael Chabon, is ready to tell us how he really feels about a particular halakhic ritual. Page Six reports that in Chabon’s forthcoming memoir, “Manhood for Amateurs,” the author passionately indicts the practice of circumcision, writing: Mutilation [is] the only honest name for this raw act that my wife…
Not to be too self-referential (as if there’s any such thing), but I’d just like to point out that in my recent paean to Adam Sandler’s (goyish) wit and (Jewish) wisdom, I rendered the following verdict: “‘You Don’t Mess With the Zohan’ is a stupid movie; I couldn’t stop laughing.” Now, I’m happy to report,…
The JTA has a great story fleshing out the recent news that the Coen brothers will be making a movie based on Michael Chabon’s “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.” “Naturally, I am over the moon about this,” Chabon wrote in an e-mail to JTA. “They are heroes of mine.” All in all, it has been a…
Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon’s latest novel “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” set in an imagined Jewish homeland in Alaska, has drawn critical raves. But it also elicited a widely discussed New York Post item provocatively titled, “NOVELIST’S UGLY VIEW OF JEWS.” Barbs flung by the wildly sensationalistic Post are easy to laugh off, and Chabon…
A word of praise for an oft-overlooked genre: the newspaper illustration. This past Sunday’s New York Times Book Review offered the Jewishly minded reader two especially good examples of the art — drawings that with a few quick brushstrokes manage to capture their subject’s essence. The first, accompanying Christopher Hitchens’s new book, “God is Not…
100% of profits support our journalism
