Andrew Silow-Carroll, JTA
• Published December 31, 2023
(JTA) — When I spoke with novelist Elizabeth Graver in August about her novel “Kantika” — inspired by her own Turkish Jewish family — I asked her how she managed to breathe life into a tired genre like the Jewish family saga.
“I want the...
Jordan Palmer, Chief Digital Content Officer
• Published November 27, 2023
Food can be a vehicle for telling stories, connecting with people, and understanding our history—including the uncomfortable parts.
In this episode of Can We Talk?, Jen Richler heads to Charleston, South Carolina to learn about Southern Jewish history...
(JTA) – Nazi book burnings, antisemitic attacks on high school students and Shylock were all invoked during a Senate hearing on school book bans Tuesday morning.
The hearing brought to Capitol Hill the debate over how much control parents should...
By Benyamin Cohen, The Forward
• Published September 11, 2023
When Elon Musk was growing up in South Africa, his mother would take him to the local Anglican church, where she was a teacher. “It did not go well,” writes historian Walter Isaacson in a highly anticipated new biography of Musk due out on Tuesday.
Musk’s...
(JNS) -- “So shines a good deed in a weary world,” Gene Wilder whispered at the climax of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” the first of many film adaptations in a book collection that has now become canonical for generations of young readers.
The...
Zia Saylor, Jewish Women’s Archive
• Published July 25, 2023
This story was originally published on JWA.com
This summer, my beach reads have taken a turn for the more picturesque. Tired after years of reading multiple books a semester in college, the text blurring as I highlighted yet another 100-page reading...
Poet and children’s book author Mary Ann Hoberman, whose own childhood in a “very loud, raucous, opinionated” Jewish household inspired the family themes that infused her books, died on July 7 at her home in Greenwich, Conn. She was 92.
(JTA) — Decades before Sandy Koufax sat out the first game of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur, and 18 years before Greenberg chased Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record in the late 1930s, a college athlete made some overlooked...
By Amy Burger, Special to the Jewish Light
• Published May 15, 2023
I was just a year old when Judy Blume’s classic young adult novel “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret” was published in 1970, long before YA Fiction was even considered a genre. By the time I hit puberty myself, around 1982, that seminal book,...
Hometown celebrity Andy Cohen is returning to St. Louis to discuss his hilarious, heartwarming, and name-dropping account of the most important year of his life and the book that came out of the experience, "The Daddy Diaries: The Year I Grew Up."
Cohen...
(JTA) – Israel Mizrahi joined dozens of fellow connoisseurs of rare Jewish books last December to watch the livestream of Genazym, the hottest auction house in the market. A bookdealer by trade, Mizrahi was also on the phone being paid to advise a wealthy...
(JTA) — When Judy Blume’s young adult novel “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” appeared in 1970, intermarried families were a small segment of the American Jewish population. Perhaps 17% of Jews were married to someone who wasn’t Jewish;...
