Over the years, I have reviewed and enjoyed the entire series of Rachel Gold novels by St. Louis attorney and author Michael Kahn, which chronicle the adventures of the formidable but endearing female lawyer and her brilliant, foul-mouthed sidekick Benny...

Let’s clear up the obvious question right away.Yes, there really is a website with the name Kaddish.com. Fire up your browser, enter the address and you’ll find this message:“Although many of us wish to say kaddish for our loved ones, we often find...

Full disclosure: I have known Irl Solomon for at least 65 years, dating back to our days as fellow students at the Congregation Shaare Emeth Religious School and as classmates at University City High School (Class of 1957).If there is a consistent thread...

Sometimes we read books that fill in details about a particular moment in the history we care deeply about, and we learn so much.Matti Friedman has written such a book about the Jewish spies who spoke Arabic as their native language because they had grown...

While Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg of New North London Synagogue was in Jerusalem visiting his father’s family, his father’s sister, Steffi, passed away. After Steffi’s burial, Wittenberg and his cousin Michal (Steffi’s daughter), began to clear...

As many readers may know, Ehud Barak is Israel’s most decorated military man. He grew up on a kibbutz in what became northern Israel after independence in 1948 and rose to chief of staff before leaving the military and going into politics on the Labor...

About a dozen years or so ago, when his son Sam was at sleep-away camp, Mitch Margo decided that instead of writing typical dad letters — “Everything’s fine at home; hope you’re having fun” — he would write Sam a serial story about a 12-year-old...

St. Louis lawyer Michael A. Kahn has entertained mystery novel fans for more than a decade with his series of nine books centered on the career of Rachel Gold, whose St. Louis legal activities often move from the mundane into the territory of classic...

It must have been a prodigious effort by editor Ezra Glinter to look through countless Yiddish Forward microfilms going back more than 100 years and come up with this superb collection of short fiction.Unlike contemporary American newspapers, Yiddish...

Native St. Louisan Jack J. Schramm chronicles his half-century as a public servant at state, federal and international levels in a comprehensive memoir, “Passionate Purpose: A Global Governance Journey” (New Insights Press, $20). Schramm, who now...