Books

The following is a modified excerpt from Is it Good for the Jews: The Crisis of America's Israel Lobby, published by Random House, Inc. It has been adapted for Jewcy by author Stephen Suleyman Schwartz. He was seventeen, sensitive, with brooding eyes, and wept easily; little more than five feet tall, slender and dark, but handsome. He felt alone, angry, and confused, and outrage overwhelmed him. He was a Jew. And he had a gun. Herschel Feibel Grynszpan was born in Hannover, Germany, but held Polish nationality. By 1938, he had lived through three years of chaos. The Nazis were in power, and he was not allowed to become an apprentice nor otherwise gain employment. He wanted to go to Palestine but found no way to get there. Finally, he went to Belgium, then crossed the border to France without authorization. He was a refugee, an illegal immigrant, non-Christian, ...

Suddenly, secular young Jews are watching documentaries about Satmars and gay Hassids, grooving to the rhythm of rapper-reggae star Matisyahu, and reading about the sealed ultra-Orthodox communities depicted in the novels of Pearl Abraham and the short stories of Nathan Englander. We’re signing up for, though not always attending, Torah classes at the local JCC. It’s hardly a surprise that many New Jewish writers of the under-40 set share in the growing communal attraction to orthodoxy. And yet most such writers, including myself, are ardently secular bacon-eating Chosen People. So why our fascination with a religion that’s so alien to us, so incompatible with the values by which we live?

Go to the biography section of any bookstore and you’ll find yourself asking, “Who let the dogs in?” Dog stories—John Grogan’s bestselling Marley & Me, Jon Katz’s border-collie psychodramas, Emily Yoffe’s comic beagle-rescue tales—are a booming sub-genre of the confessional memoir. And the boom shows no signs of stopping: Katz published yet another book about life with Orson, his alpha collie and muse, in September. Americans love their pets, of course, and they love to treat them like little people—just look at the popularity of dog strollers, Burberry collars, canine massage therapy, and “bark mitzvah” parties. These days, though, this kind of anthropomorphism is accompanied with an interesting twist: the dog not only as human, but as counselor, ...

I’m tired of the Holocaust—the great tragedy Jews devour like a falafel plate after the Yom Kippur fast. I recently declared a personal moratorium on Holocaust movies, museums, and memoirs. The Pianist: didn’t see it. The new version of Elie Weisel’s Night: didn’t read it. The controversial Holocaust memorial in Berlin? I’ll pass. In school I read Anne Frank, watched filmstrips full of emaciated men and women in dirty striped pajamas, and stumbled upon a Polish book with a grey cover filled with pictures of heaps of dead bodies. It was enough. I know what happened. But I can’t seem to avoid the Holocaust. It plagues the books I read, the New Jew hipster salon conversations I’ve been lured into—it even seeps into my own writing. Its presence lingers in every word written by Jews in the last 50 years. Younger Jewish writers inevitably put their own morbid twist on, ...

The Amsterdam apartment where Anne Frank began her diary before going into hiding from the Nazis has been restored to the style of the 1930s to create a refuge for persecuted writers….Using photographs from the family archive and a letter from Anne Frank describing the apartment, a team of experts worked for months to remove modern fixtures and decorate and furnish the residence in the same style it was left in by the family. A carpenter reconstructed the writing table at which the 13-year-old probably started her diary in June 1942, weeks before disappearing into the secret annex of a canal-side warehouse to hide during German occupation of the Netherlands…. The first resident of the apartment at Merwedeplein in southern Amsterdam is Algerian novelist and poet el-Mahdi Acherchour, 32, who is working on a new novel. --Reuters, October 28, 2005

Every writer wants to push boundaries. We all want to be “edgy.” I’m sure I’m not the first writer who has found himself lying awake at night wondering who he has to pay to get banned, seized, and censored. But with over a million copies in print of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” (once the subject of an obscenity trial), with Jerry Seinfeld making out during Schindler’s List and Larry David mocking Holocaust survivors on national television, I and my fellow young Jew-writer brethren face a more difficult question: What conventions are left to challenge, what (l)edge is there left to inch out onto? Jewish writing in the 20th century has invariably been labelled “on the edge.” In the Diaspora, and most specifically in the North American Diaspora, the “edge” has come from being outsider immigrants making their way through a suspicious, separate, antisemitic populace. As 29-year-old novelist Dara Horn says in the ...