Jo-Ann Mort


Jerusalem's Three Unauthorized Portraits

By Jo-Ann Mort

Jerusalem's Three Unauthorized Portraits
Jerusalem lives in the past and present simultaneously, which makes figuring it out so frustrating and difficult. Three new books take a crack, with uneven results.Read More

The Age of Idealism, Debunked

By Jo-Ann Mort

‘The personal is political” was the political headline for the international feminist movement, and it could just as well be the takeaway phrase of this intriguing new work by British novelist Linda Grant. Chronicling three generations among families, Grant, a former journalist-turned-novelist known for her reportage and fictional accounts of lefty Jews in North London, writes here about a couple who were at Oxford together and lived their married life in Islington, a gentrified neighborhood of London similar to Brooklyn’s Park Slope or Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the 1990s. These were neighborhoods that went from seedy to chic, where former leftists became real estate millionaires and a certain sort of Jewish intellectual struggled for a settled sense of normalcy.Read More

Heroes and Villains, Key Players Who Made a Difference

By Jo-Ann Mort

Heroes and Villains, Key Players Who Made a Difference
In November 1909, thousands of New York City garment workers convened a mass meeting at Cooper Union to protest sweatshop conditions. The norm in the burgeoning garment industry included 60- to 80-hour work weeks, flammable scraps strewn around the shops, child labor and providing your own supplies, such as scissors and thread.Read More

A Surreal-ist and a Journal-ist

By Jo-Ann Mort

Though their styles are distinct, poets Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish are two of the Arab world’s modern literary giants and were once part of the same group of writers in 1970s Beirut that clustered around the magazine Mawaqif (Arab for “Attitudes”). Their differences are pronounced in two newly translated collections: Adonis’s “Selected Poems” and Darwish’s “Journal of an Ordinary Grief.”Read More

The Kibbutz at 100

By Jo-Ann Mort

The Kibbutz at 100
The kibbutz, one of the grand social and economic experiments of the past century, was once a symbol of a liberal, humanistic Israel. Today, the kibbutzim, in their 100th year, have been profoundly transformed, and the face of Israel is a different kind of settlement — the West Bank settlement that seeks to build “facts on the ground” from a biblical perspective. The pendulum of Zionism, which was once weighted heavily toward a socialist-Zionist perspective, has shifted to a right-wing Zionism.Read More



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