More in ‘Louis Brandeis’

For many years, certain Jews—and those who dislike them—have relished an image of the Jewish body as skinny and weak, hunched-over, barely able to hold up its Jewish bobblehead, with a gargantuan brain and massive, jutting nose. This is a caricature, obviously, but one that is based on a tiny kernel of ethnic reality, a ...

At 900 pages, Louis D. Brandeis: A Life, by Melvin Urofsky, may be more than twice the size of an ordinary biography, but because Brandeis had four major careers, even this door-stopper of a book can claim to be economical. Brandeis’s chief claim to fame, of course, is his long tenure as a Supreme Court ...

• A cab driver in Montreal is fighting multiple citations that he violated regulations by displaying, among other knickknacks, Jewish items such as mezuzahs in his vehicle; suspiciously, he began getting ticketed “only days after speaking out in the media in 2006 to complain that the taxi bureau was failing to crack down on unlicensed ...

• Barbra Streisand, who New York Magazine says entered the mainstream by “smoothing out all her misfit attributes until she seemed almost homogenized: like buttah,” has returned to form with her new album Love is the Answer, which she will promote with a show at her old New York haunt the Village Vanguard on Saturday. ...

Writers’ day jobs tend to provide inspiration in one of two ways. Either the office stultifies them so intensely that writing offers an escape, or work fascinates them and they devote their off-hours to chronicling their careers. Danny Evans, firmly in the former category, began blogging about his family in the fall of 2004 to distract himself from his job as an HMO copywriter. “I needed a receptacle for what little sanity I had left,” he told Good Housekeeping. “Something that reminded me I was human despite having sold out to Corporate America.” In Rage Against the Meshugenah: Why It Takes Balls to Go Nuts (New American Library, August), Evans expands upon his popular blog, DadGoneMad.com, to chronicle bouts of depression and therapy, with Yinglish-speckled asides about growing up Jewish in Simi Valley, California. Drowning his despair in beer and porn, Evans occasionally sounds less like an up-to-date Alex Portnoy—who, after all, could recite Yeats from memory—than a young Al Bundy.