By Laura Hodes
In his debut novel, ‘Broadway Baby,’ Alan Shapiro, the author of nine volumes of poetry, gives the much-maligned 1950s-era Jewish mother a chance to tell her story.
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By Laura Hodes
Laura Hodes reviews “The Last Act of Lilka Kadison,” a staged drama that explores the loneliness of old age and, more explicitly, the magic of the theater.
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By Laura Hodes
Joseph Skibell’s third novel, “A Curable Romantic,” evokes the spirit of “Candide” with a Jewish postmodern twist in order to ask the same question as Voltaire: How can we be optimistic in the face of evil?Read More
By Laura Hodes
Paramount Pictures’ new laugh-out-loud comedy “Dinner for Schmucks” is only the latest in a crop of recent films and novels to idealize not the schmuck, but the schlemiel.
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By Laura Hodes
After Joshua Braff’s excellent but largely unheralded “The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green,” his second novel is another coming-of-age story set in the mid-1970s. In “Peep Show,” though, the protagonist, David, and his sister are trapped by divorcing parents between two closed Jewish worlds of New York: the Scylla of the Times Square porn industry and the Charybdis of the Hasidic community.
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