From the Germanophilic perspective of British editor Simon Winder, one of the unfortunate consequences of the Nazi era is that the Reich’s crimes get in the way of contemporary appreciation of German culture’s finer points: you know, “great battles, enormous castles, fairy princesses,” beer and sausage, that sort of thing. No surprise, then, that Winder ...

Some historical personalities lived so long and ranged so widely that they pose unusual challenges to biographers. Take Moses Montefiore, who lived from 1784 to 1885 and was among the most prominent men, let alone Jews, of his era. An Italian-born British banker, he made a fortune working with the Rothschilds, was knighted by Queen ...

Given how prolific he has been—his oeuvre includes two novels, a handful of plays, screenplays for Carnal Knowledge and Little Murders and Popeye, illustrations for The Phantom Tollbooth and a dozen children’s books of his own, an Oscar-winning animated short, and, oh, yeah, more than 40 years’ worth of Pulitzer Prize-winning comic strips in the ...

In his tennis whites on the courts of a retirement community in Sarasota, Florida, Nat Lehrman doesn’t fit the image of an aging sexual revolutionary: he’s no jowly Hugh Hefner in a red silk robe, nor Al Goldstein, homeless and pathetic. But then Lehrman, the editor responsible for transforming Playboy in the 1960s from just ...

Are the 8-year-olds in your life ready to learn about lynching? Stacia Deutsch and Rhody Cohon think so. These co-authors have carved out an impressive niche for themselves as authors of historical and pop culture chapterbooks for the grade school set; their “junior novelization” of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs reached #1 on the ...

It’s high time somebody said it: David Remnick’s New Yorker has had a borderline creepy fetish for post-Soviet Jews. Is there any other way to explain the magazine’s making room not only for fiction by Gary Shteyngart and Lara Vapnyar and David Bezmozgis and Sana Krasikov, but also for Gina Ochsner’s stories “The Fractious South” ...

In the world of The Wire, Jews play exactly three roles in the justice system: slimy lawyers for gangsters and drug dealers, idealistic assistant DAs, and undistinguished cops who rarely merit screen time. Steven M. Forman’s protagonist, Eddie Perlmutter, is one of the latter, a Boston cousin of Jay Landsman—a Jewish cop, in other words, ...

Religion is on the rise, even among the secular. In Dani Shapiro’s Devotion: A Memoir (HarperCollins, February), for example, a 40-something mother who had long before abandoned the traditions of Orthodox Judaism with which she was raised, seeks better answers to her son’s questions about God than her laissez-faire secularism provides. Being a novelist and ...

Writing fiction about writing fiction can be a tricky business, so novelists often substitute an artist of another sort—most typically, a painter—as their protagonists, examining through them the vicissitudes of a creative vocation. James Sturm, creator of the critically acclaimed graphic novel The Golem’s Mighty Swing and a founder of the Center for Cartoon Studies ...

That European Jewish immigrants and Arab natives would struggle to play nicely together after the establishment of a Zionist homeland in the Middle East wasn’t too difficult to predict. Israel Zangwill—who, as playwright of The Melting Pot, would devote considerable attention to issues of assimilation and social integration in the following years—noted in a lecture ...