An impressive work of intellect and presentation.
Unique theories on how “feeling Jewish” plays out not only among secular Jews, but also among individuals with no Jewish heritage.
In alternately playful and academic prose filled with down-to-earth anecdotes and grand theories, Baum (English Literature and Critical Theory/Univ. of Southampton) suggests that in a troubled global village, stereotypes often ascribed to Jews—guilt, hysteria, envy, resentment, self-hatred, extreme mother-love—may have become universal. Throughout history, Jews have been reviled and persecuted, both emulated and envied for their successes. While explaining the concept of feeling Jewish, Baum relies heavily on representations of Jews in novels, memoirs, films, plays, sacred texts, and on psychologists' couches. She makes multiple references to a variety of significant Jewish figures, including Philip Roth, Franz Kafka, Woody Allen, Groucho Marx, and Sigmund Freud. At times, though, Baum examines her own back story, revealing how her reactions to all sorts of occurrences have become linked to how she feels about herself as a Jewish woman. Does she feel shame about her Jewishness? If so, why? If not, what to call her feelings about being Jewish? Does the word “Jew” arrive with a trigger warning in the same way that “black” or “Muslim” or “gay” might? As the author seeks answers, she produces a wide-ranging, deeply original inquiry into modern life. One of Baum’s overarching messages is that in a world where non-Jews as well as Jews perceive themselves as marginalized and thus threatened, stereotypical Jewish feelings seem a good fit in other cultures. “When it comes to feeling panicky, weak, outnumbered, and existentially threatened, Jews are by no means all alone,” writes the author. “Indeed, the sense of dispossession that might be said to underpin resurgent ‘nationalist’ feelings could hardly have more in common with the feelings of those rootless cosmopolitans accused of aggravating them.”
An impressive work of intellect and presentation.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-300-21244-0
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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