Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper— When the Yiddish-language Hasidic online chat forum Kave Shtibel (Coffee House) began a thread about our book, A Fortress in Brooklyn, less than two weeks after it was published in May, we were pleased but not surprised. The extensive Hasidic print culture that traditionally included
Alexandra Dunietz— Would Sydney Taylor, author of the All-of-a-Kind books, have had a Facebook page? I usually avoid counterfactual history, but while helping June Cummins with research on Taylor, I occasionally wondered what she would have made of the internet. What makes me think she would have engaged in some
Adina Hoffman— Ben Hecht was always falling in love—though he never tumbled harder and faster into that ecstatic state than he did when he met Chicago. “The city of my first manhood,” he called it. The place enthralled him with its blur of rooftops and chimneys, its signage and streetcars,
Bernard Avishai— Irving Howe famously said that the cruelest thing one could do with Portnoy’s Complaint was “read it twice.” But why reread it when the first time was unforgettable? Back when the book was published, exactly 50 years ago, I knew people who sat around in coffee shops, student unions,
Hasia R. Diner— Nearly every place the immigrant Jewish peddlers went, with the exception of the British Isles and Scandinavia, they stumbled into societies in which color mattered. In some places—Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand—the color divide followed a native-versus-European colonist divide. Where one stood across the native-European
Baseball season is upon us and Hank Greenberg: The Hero Who Didn’t Want to Be One ,“a wonderful book”, according to the New York Daily News, is the newest addition to YUP’s Jewish Lives series, masterfully written by New York Times bestselling author, Mark Kurlansky. Matters of personal choice easily