Jews are the quintessential successful minority group by any economic measure. They are disproportionately represented in the top rankings in business, finance, the arts, scientific research, architecture, medicine and law. Likewise, Mormons and new immigrants to the United States from…
Shirley Graetz’s She Wrote on Clay (Hadley Rille Books, 2013) is so intriguing, so mesmerizing, so unique, so well-written, I could not put it down! Graetz was born in Dusseldorf, Germany. She came to study at the Hebrew University of…
It was Aug. 9, 2001. I was in Jerusalem after 19 years absence, to attend a convention and do research on a memoir, Witness to History: Ten Years as a Woman Foreign Correspondent in Israel (still unpublished). I was staying…
Jacob Dinezon (1856-1919) was a Yiddish novelist and short-story writer, as famous during his lifetime as were his contemporaries, the three pillars of late-19th- and early-20th-century Yiddish literature, Mendele Mocher Sforim, Y.L. Peretz and Sholem Aleichem. All of these masters…
While I have a very good Jewish background, enhanced by the hundreds of books I have reviewed over the years, I am, by no means, a scholar. However, when I heard about The Status of Women in Jewish Law: Responsa…
Children rarely pay much attention to what their parents are doing. Children of parents on the wrong side of the law are no different. They may overhear conversations around the house, they may see headlines in the media but they…
In 1963, landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander was appalled when she saw park workers at Jericho Beach burning logs that had broken away from booms. She called up Bill Livingston, the Vancouver Park Board superintendent, and suggested placing the logs…
Gary Shteyngart is widely regarded as one of the most entertaining storytellers in contemporary literature. The highly enjoyable memoir Little Failure (Random House, 2014), his fourth book after three well-received novels, is his story as a Jewish immigrant from Russia…
Reading From the Dream, Carol Rose’s most recent collection of poetry, led me to my bookshelf, where her first collection, Behind the Blue Gate, was safely stored. This shelf is home to books that have particularly impressed me, and which…
There are some very talented writers who contribute to the Jewish Independent, so it’s not surprising that many of them have been published elsewhere. Here are brief reviews of six books that feature contributions from, or are authored by, freelancers…
