Jewish Review of Books

29/07/2025

One of my favorite Jewish jokes is about Chaim and Mendel, who meet in a displaced persons camp after World War II. They become best friends, but when Chaim receives permission to immigrate to the United States and Mendel gets papers for Britain, they have to part. After two years, Chaim decides to go to England to visit his friend. As he steps off the ocean liner, he sees Mendel waiting for him in the crowd, now clean-shaven and wearing a beautiful Savile Row suit, weeping loudly. “Mendel,” Chaim says, “I thought you’d be happy to see me. What’s the matter?” “Haven’t you heard?” Mendel replies. “We lost India!”

—Adam Kirsch

Rachel Cockerell didn't write a word of her inventive memoir. The past did.

22/07/2025

On my way to Cynthia Ozick’s house in New Rochelle in the back of an Uber, I began to worry about whether I knew how to properly dip a madeleine in tea. Had I ever even eaten a madeleine? Did those cellophaned three-packs of tasteless shell-shaped sponges at the Starbucks register count? In preparation for our meeting, I’d read Giles Harvey’s 2016 profile in The New York Times Magazine, in which Ozick complimented him on his cookie-dipping technique: “‘You’re doing exactly the right thing!’ she said. ‘Just what Proust did!’” But how had Proust done it when he evoked those childhood memories? And which end of the cookie had Harvey broken off so impeccably?

—Read Abraham Socher's full interview with Cynthia Ozick.

"I can’t and won’t reread: What’s done is done. Print is writing’s final fate."

15/07/2025

Don't miss the latest issue of JRB! We've got Jewish riots, haunted houses, and Cynthia Ozick's Old Country chic.

Story Evades Cogitation: An Interview with Cynthia Ozick Abraham Socher "I can’t and won’t reread: What’s done is done. Print is writing’s final fate."

20/05/2025

In the talmudic era, many Jewish legal documents were standardized. Even magic bowls inscribed with methods to divorce a demon.

In the talmudic era, many Jewish legal documents were standardized. Even magic bowls inscribed with methods to divorce a demon.

18/04/2025

Tomorrow marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In 1948, the great Jewish writer Vasily Grossman wrote a testament to the memory of the Warsaw Ghetto—one that went unpublished for more than seventy years.

In the aftermath of destruction, Vasily Grossman saw redemption in a stocking maker carrying ashes back to Lodz.

08/04/2025

Demonic divorces, time traveling goats, and biblical visions that are out of this world: what else could it be but the new issue of Jewish Review of Books!

Escape Goat Jeremy Dauber Dara Horn's new graphic novel about a neverending Passover seder and a talking, time-travelling goat is great fun. It's also a deep meditation on Jewish history and memory.

20/02/2025

"Setting aside images of the evil carnival at Khan Younis and staring instead at the pictures of Shiri Bibas and her two boys, I thought of the line from Second Samuel."

Setting aside images of the evil carnival at Khan Younis and staring instead at the pictures of Shiri Bibas and her two boys, I thought of the line from Second Samuel.

12/02/2025

Émile Zola’s J’accuse...! might be modern journalism’s most famous headline. But whose idea was it? https://tinyurl.com/5dvhfasw

10/02/2025

"Émile Zola came late to the Dreyfus Affair. When his famous “J’accuse” appeared on the front page of the Paris newspaper L’Aurore in 1898, Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer wrongly convicted of treason, had already been imprisoned on Devil’s Island for three years. Nevertheless, with a single headline and in a single day, Zola managed to draw back the curtain on the years long spy scandal, uncovering motive and plot and naming names.

But it was not the first time that clear evidence of Dreyfus’s innocence had been published and not even the first time the words “J’accuse” had appeared in connection with the case. The arguments and phrasing that made “J’accuse” a journalistic masterpiece had been written years earlier by someone else—a Jewish author named Bernard Lazare."

—Read Lauren Gottlieb Lockshin on the Jewish journalist whose little-known contributions were critical to freeing Alfred Dreyfus.

Émile Zola’s J’accuse...! might be modern journalism’s most famous headline. But whose idea was it?

03/02/2025

"Though from a bourgeois, Anglo-Jewish literary background (my father is a novelist who is also considered the doyen of soccer writers), I had been drawn to the working-class world of football hooliganism in my early teens. This was after my parents transferred me from a privileged English school to a working-class one. My mother somehow perceived nonexistent parallels between newfangled state “comprehensive” schools in 1970s England and the German gymnasia she had grown up with.

"I was mercilessly bullied at the new school. My nose was broken, and I was repeatedly headbutted and had a flick-knife held to my throat. When a classmate told me to 'stop being Jewish with the ball,' I spat in his face."

Read Mark Glanville's full article about being a Jewish soccer hooligan.

https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/jewish-life/17942/ghosts-of-hooligans-past/

"When a classmate told me to 'stop being Jewish with the ball,' I spat in his face."