Matt Plen surveys the ‘introducing Judaism’ genre

Reviewing Judith Butler’s examination of nationalism and modern Jewish philosophy

Affirming a Jewish tradition which speaks for sexual minorities

Reviewing Antony Lerman’s personal and political memoirs

Music from a Speeding Train by Harriet Murav
Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands by Amelia M. Glaser

Roth left behind a sizeable cache of correspondence, a generous selection of which has now been translated into English for the first time by Michael Hofmann, the poet-translator whose clear-eyed, sharp- tongued devotion has been the making of Roth’s posthumous English-language reputation.

Judaism: A Way of Being by David Gelernter Yale University Press • 2009 Open Minded Torah: Of Irony, Fundamentalism and Love by William Kolbrener Continuum • 2011 I blame Jonathan Sacks. Across his oeuvre he has pioneered a style of writing about Judaism designed to put even the most refined gentile Englishman at ease. Beautifully written, his work weaves in [...]

The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics By Gilad Atzmon Zero Books 2011 Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights By David Landy Zed Books 2011 So contested has the issue of antisemitism become and so promiscuously is the term used that it is increasingly difficult tofind clarity amid the fog of frenzied debate. The publication of these two recent [...]

Far to Go by Alison Pick Headline Review 2011 The List by Martin Fletcher Thomas Dunne Books 2011 In one way it’s curious that Anne Frank’s diary has become by far the most pre- eminent Holocaust text, because it is also the most oblique. Its power emanates from something never seen directly by its writer. Since the focus is primarily [...]

The Origin of Violence Fabrice Humbert Serpent’s Tail 2011 The Origin of Violence (L’Origine de la Violence), the author’s third novel and the first to be translated into English, was swiftly extolled by the French press as a ‘great novel’ and a ‘revelation’. The novel won Le Prix Renaudot du Livre de Poche (the Prix Renaudot paperback award), a French [...]

Is The Controversy that Follows Philip Roth Justified? Why does controversy seem to follow Philip Roth around? His first book, Goodbye, Columbus, touched off a riot of a reaction in the Jewish- American community when it was published in 1959. Roth, his detractors said, went out of his way to depict his fictional suburban Jews in an unpleasant light, a [...]

by Jeremy Ben-Ami Palgrave Macmillan. 2011 Jeremy Ben-Ami is a first rate political operator. In four short years he has made J Street a $5 million organisation and successfully built a Washington power base in opposition to the AIPAC juggernaut and the rest of the so called ‘pro-Israel’ lobby. With its mantra of ‘Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace’, J Street funds electoral battles, [...]

by Jeremy Dauber Yale University Press, 2010 If the suggestive title of Jeremy Dauber’s In the Demon’s Bedroom attracts the attention of the casual passerby, it will have done more than satisfy the book’s author. Rather, it will have proven one of the book’s primary claims:a writer knows how to pique his readers’ interest. Moreover, an author knows how to [...]

Vertigo/DC Comics, 2010

By Tony Judt William Heinemann, 2010 The death of the historian and essayist Tony Judt in August 2010 attracted a great deal of media attention. Much of it was dedicated to his journalistic writings on Israel, including the first three paragraphs of the obituary in The Daily Telegraph, five paragraphs in the obituary in the New York Times and three [...]

Two recent books explore the idea of ‘non-duality’, in which ‘everything is God’.

Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture by Edward Skidelsky Princeton University Press Sitting on the judging panel for this year’s Wingate Literary prize, I noticed several patterns emerging. One was the length of most of the entries; it seems that following the model of the 37 volume Babylonian Talmud, many Jewish authors cannot seem to express themselves in less [...]

By David Cesarani William Heinemann, March 2009, £20.00 On the evening of 6 May 1947 Alexander Rubowitz left his parents’ home in Jerusalem and never returned. Rubowitz was 16 at the time, and a member of LEHI (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), the smallest and most ardent underground organisation fighting against the British Mandate in Palestine. Commonly referred to [...]

By Moris Farhi Telegram Books, March 2009, £12.99 In a lecture at Harvard in 1967, Jorge Luis Borges mourned the passing of the epic, a form he loved for its fusion of music and narration and its heroic breadth. In contrast to the myopic and introverted modern novel, it offered a ‘pattern for all men’ — something that we in [...]

By Sana Krasikov Portobello Books, June 2009, £10.99 Anyone who expects a short story to be an impressionistic wash, a glimpsed moment that requires less than full concentration, should know that the eight stories in Sana Krasikov’s debut collection permit the reader no such idleness. On the contrary, One More Year demands commitment. Its narratives are intricately woven, populated by [...]

By Leonard Bell Auckland University Press, October 2009, £34.50 ‘A very good portrait is a paradox,’ says Leonard Bell, professor of Art History at Auckland University. He considers how revelation and mystery co-exist in the work of Marti Friedlander, and her motivation for each of the 185 photographs included in this handsome book, many now being published for the first [...]

In an article in the Times, Anthony Beevor calls The Kindly Ones ‘a great work of literary fiction, to which readers and scholars will turn for decades to come’. The review is eminently quotable, of course, but alert readers will have to ask: Really? Scholars? Told from a point of view both sensationalist and horrifying — that of an SS [...]

The appropriateness of Messianic hopes in an era pronounced as violent and bleak can seem to touch the nadir of madness or near the course to insanity. Nevertheless, it is precisely at these times that the appeal to the Messianic seems more intense, real and credible. Michael Heller in his new collection of poetry, Eschaton writes: ‘Impossible for me to [...]

When Nonel and Vovel made work about the Middle East in 2000 they were asked: who are your audiences? When they make work about the Middle East in 2009 the common question is: do you do it because it is trendy? The first thought crossing one’s mind after putting down The Novel of Nonel and Vovel (following an exhilarated sigh [...]

By Tony Judt Heinemann, 2008, £20 In the early 1990s Tony Judt was in his mid-40s, a fairly obscure British historian, specialising in modern French history. Three things happened to make him one of the best-known historians of his generation. First, in 1995, he became Director of the Remarque Institute at New York University, just at the time when historians [...]

Ed. Rabbi Norman Solomon Penguin, 2009, £16.99 Talmud is essentially an activity, not a book; you engage in it, rather than read it as you would a piece of literature. Thus Normon Solomon introduces the challenge of how to reduce this epic work, how to capture the intricacies and richness of the Babylonian Talmud that shaped rabbinic Judaism and remains [...]

By Eva Hoffman Harvill Secker 2008, £16.99 Reading Eva Hoffman’s new novel is a mixed experience. At first, I found the rarefied and brittle consciousness of the protagonist, Isabel Merton, hard to engage with. Her life as an internationally famous concert pianist seems both admirable and enviable, yet she is dissatisfied. However, Isabel herself experiences unease at what she thinks [...]

By Edna Nashon Berg Publishers, 2008, £17.99 The startling image on the cover of this book is a work by the Israeli artist Nechama Golan. It is a high-heeled sandal made of paper, ink and glue. The shoe is printed with a rabbinic text which explains how a woman is acquired, bringing together a number of ideas discussed in this [...]

By Simon Mawer Little, Brown, 2009, £ 16.99 ‘Light and space…that is everything you need’. So declares a visitor to the spectacular Landauer House, the architectural apotheosis of modernity erected in the days before the black nightmare of World War II. There would be something almost too neat about this perfect construction, this paean to rationality and progress, emerging just [...]

By Nathan Abrams Five Leaves, 2008, £12.99 In the mid-1990s I worked as a research assistant for Jewish Continuity, the short-lived organisation that sought to ensure the continuity of Judaism in this country. One of its major concerns was preventing intermarriage and, in order to do so, great pains were taken to research the lives of British Jewish single young [...]