A comprehensive, contextually rich study.
Jewish Daily Forward reporter Beckerman traces the gradual post–World War II movement of self-awareness within the two largest Jewish communities of the diaspora, Russia and America.
“Advocating for Soviet Jewry taught American Jews how to lobby,” writes the author in this wide-ranging work, which colorfully fleshes out personal stories within the headlines—from 1963, when the newly galvanized Jewish community of Riga, Latvia, began digging up 25,000 Jewish bodies killed by the Nazis in 1941, to the exodus of Russian Jews to Israel and America after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. Jews within the Soviet state had coexisted uneasily with their fellow Russians, marginalized and often discriminated against, as dictated by the “fifth line” on one’s internal passport. In postwar America, Jews were so eager to assimilate that “there was increasingly very little Jewish about being a Jew.” The perception shifted after some key events, including the publication of Leon Uris’s Exodus (1958), which stirred the Zionist yearning, and Elie Wiesel’s Night (1960), distilled the Holocaust’s horror; the highly publicized trial of Adolf Eichmann, which unleashed the little-known particulars of the Holocaust; the rallying by Senators Ribicoff and Javits, which helped bring together Jews to elect President Kennedy and throw their weight behind the cause of Soviet Jewry; and the agitation of small, bold groups of Zionists in Russia. These included highly esteemed physicist Andrei Sakharov, who openly decried the Soviet regime’s anti-Semitism and was persecuted like so many others; and folk singer Shlomo Carlebach, who created the anthem of Soviet Jewry, “Am Yisrael Chai,” in 1965. Brooklyn rabbi Meir Kahane tapped into Jewish alienation by founding the Jewish Defense League. Natan Sharansky became the refuseniks’ poster boy, and his wife, Avital, the celebrity advocate during his imprisonment. Beckerman also depicts the dynamic campaign for Jewish resettlement.
A comprehensive, contextually rich study.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-618-57309-7
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
HISTORY | JEWISH | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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