Feuding, not coddling, is the true American intellectual tradition
Thirty-five years after the Cold War fizzled, America’s most entertaining and iconoclastic writer about culture and politics remains too hot to handle
The most swaggering and macho of Jewish writers illuminated postwar America like no one else
Fantastical title fights inspired by boxing’s ‘Fight of the Century’
The turbulent private—and public—affairs of a titanic figure in American Jewish intellectual life
A new authorized biography and collection of essays show why the literary figure has been so mythologized, reviled, and revered
The author of ‘Slaves of New York’ dishes on male reviewers, passing fame, and the satire of bad luck
Kevin Dutton’s new best-seller rehashes Norman Mailer’s ideas on deviance, but it leaves out Jewish men
Artists, particularly in theater, are still plagued by the slur “Gay Commie Jew.” But how did it come about?
Shivah Stars
A Roy Lichtenstein show at the Art Institute of Chicago reveals the movement’s affront to WASPy decorum
In the new collected stories of Nathan Englander, and in his revised Haggadah, Jews cling tenuously to the easily broken chains of tradition
Joseph Heller, who embodied masculinity in American postwar literature, for better and for worse, chronicled a major shift in American Jewish identity
Ransom Center in Austin is a hotbed of Jewish literary papers
Lost Books
A few more suggestions
The Spanish writer Jorge Semprún, who died in June, survived Buchenwald and had a love-hate relationship with Communism in postwar Europe. A longtime friend remembers his star power and derring-do.
The author was a fan of essayist Seymour Krim’s lively prose, but it wasn’t until a joint visit to a Taos commune that he saw the man himself come fully alive
