By Gerald Sorin
When Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line in 1947, he inspired blacks and Jews alike. But the role of Jews in baseball was surprisingly complicated, a new book reveals.
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By Gerald Sorin
We continue to be in the tricky business of trying to define what we mean (or don’t mean) by “Jewish writer.” Any writer who is a Jew? Only a writer, Jewish or not, who includes Jewish “content” in his or her work? Or a writer, often Jewish, whose work, with or without Jewish specificity, reveals, when read closely, Jewish meaning, values or sensibility? Derek Rubin, editor of “Promised Lands,” is determined to demonstrate, as he did in his earlier anthology, “Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer” (Schocken Books, 2005), not only that all such Jewish writers exist, but also that whatever else Jewish writing might mean, it almost always embodies a “core Jewish theme” of longing and belonging.
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By Gerald Sorin
We continue to be in the tricky business of trying to define what we mean (or don’t mean) by “Jewish writer.” Any writer who is a Jew? Only a writer, Jewish or not, who includes Jewish “content” in his or her work? Or a writer, often Jewish, whose work, with or without Jewish specificity, reveals, when read closely, Jewish meaning, values or sensibility? Derek Rubin, editor of “Promised Lands,” is determined to demonstrate, as he did in his earlier anthology, “Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer” (Schocken Books, 2005), not only that all such Jewish writers exist, but also that whatever else Jewish writing might mean, it almost always embodies a “core Jewish theme” of longing and belonging.
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By Gerald Sorin
A Coat of Many Colors: Immigration, Globalization, and Reform In New York City’s Garment Industry
Edited by Daniel Soyer
Fordham University Press, 312 pages, $75.
* * *‘What’s the difference between a Jewish clothing worker and a Jewish psychiatrist?” an old joke goes. Answer: “One generation.”Actually it was more like two orRead More
By Gerald Sorin
The German Money
By Lev Raphael
Leapfrog Press, 200 pages, $14.95.
* * *Lev Raphael, a child of Holocaust survivors, widely admired for mystery novels centered around the hypocrisies and inanities of academic life, is even better represented by his short stories. His debut collection, “Dancing on Tisha B’Av” (St. Martin’s Press,Read More
