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Honor and Comfort

By Noach Dzmura

How one organization helps Jews honor and comfort the dead.Read More

Not Science Fiction

By Allison Gaudet Yarrow

Imagine worshipping a writer in early life, then becoming an essential force in preserving his work. This is Jonathan Lethem’s labor of love, to keep us reading Philip K. Dick. A music aficionado and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, Lethem now has his own vast canon — seven novels, numerous stories, a novella, a comic book and more. His personal success makes this posthumous relationship unique. In choosing four of Dick’s later novels — “A Maze of Death,” “Valis,” “The Divine Invasion” and “The Transmigration of Timothy Archer” — to edit and contextualize, Lethem hoped to revise the common thinking that Dick’s science psychedelia and religion writings were separate trajectories entirely; rather, he proposes that they came from the same fruitful place.Read More

Dreams of the Displaced

By Peter Ephross

In the aftermath of World War II, roughly 250,000 Jews — most of them Holocaust survivors — lived in displaced persons camps in Europe. Many of these people were attracted to Zionism, and about two-thirds of them eventually would move to British Mandate Palestine or to Israel. In his new book, “Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust” (Wayne State University Press), Avinoam J. Patt, who holds the Philip D. Feltman Chair in Modern Jewish History at the University of Hartford, explores the role that Zionism played in the lives of the refugees, particularly among the younger generation. Peter Ephross spoke with Patt recently about Zionism’s appeal to displaced persons, and the controversy stoked by Israeli historians on the topic.Read More

Letting Go of a Dark Thing

By Dan Friedman

Boaz Yakin is the award-winning director of “Fresh” (1994), “Price Above Rubies” (1998) and “Remember the Titans” (2000). His latest film, “Death in Love” — which he not only wrote, produced and directed, but also funded with his life savings — has just been released to mixed reviews. It deals with the psychological traumas that get passed down through the generations of a family whose matriarch (played by Jacqueline Bisset) is a Holocaust survivor. Her time in the concentration camp was spent as the imprisoned but somewhat accommodating lover of a Nazi doctor there, and that complex and pathological legacy is transmitted to her two sons. The Forward’s Dan Friedman spoke with Yakin recently about the genesis of “Death in Love,” the film’s purposefully assaultive nature and why he thinks the Holocaust plays too big a role in shaping Diaspora identity.Read More

Bringing Up Kids in America

By Allison Gaudet Yarrow

Sam Apple is a modern journeyman who curiously encounters the world with pen in hand. First, he trailed a Yiddish-singing sheepherder through tiny villages in Austria to write “Schlepping Through the Alps.” Now, Apple tackles the bug-eyed wow of becoming a first-time father in his new memoir, “American Parent.”Read More

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