Books
Year in Review: Books in 2019
Bookish morsels from the JC critics in 2019
December 30, 2019 15:39
5 min read
Bookish morsels from the JC critics in 2019
December 30, 2019 15:39“The book is framed as a series of questions posed to Professor Lipstadt by two fictional characters: ‘Abigail’, a Jewish student, and ‘Joe’, a non-Jewish academic colleague. She replies to them in letters. It might have worked for Socrates but it doesn’t work for Lipstadt, not least because Socrates didn’t take the opportunity to praise his own brilliance, as she does hers: ‘Dear Professor Lipstadt, thank you so much for that explanation. Things are beginning to fall into place’, she writes, along with ‘Dear Professor Lipstadt, thank you for that sobering and thought-provoking series of letters’. You get the picture.”
Stephen Pollard on Antisemitism Here and Now by Deborah Lipstadt
“A Jewish, foreign-born Marxist consistently monitored by MI5, Hobsbawm was never quite “one of us” to the British establishment. But, by the time of his death in 2012, he was probably the world’s best-known and most widely read historian.”
Daniel Snowman on Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History by Richard J. Evans
“It is true that the Jews are far too sensitive, though they have perhaps been sensitised by history. They are too ready to imagine an insult; they are not prepared to give enough leeway, even to allow for a certain misbehaviour; they do carry a chip on their shoulders. They have to compensate, and it is a part of the psychology.”
Yehudi Menuhin interviewed in No Longer With Us: Encounters with Naim Attallah
“The meticulously researched and fluently written story she relates is, of course, familiar, but is rarely told with the coherence and clarity achieved by Engelstein, who has come up with an unexpected page-turner.”
Mark Glanville on Russia in Flames by Laura Engelstein
“As befits a Professor of Jewish Studies at Oxford, Martin Goodman has produced an erudite, deeply researched doorstop of a book, one of the merits of which is that it should silence anyone who wants to talk about ‘authentic’ Judaism. For Professor Goodman shows, with a display of prodigious yet unshowy learning, that — despite his book’s title — there is no such thing as a ‘history of Judaism’, only a history of Judaisms’.”
Howard Cooper on A History of Judaism by Martin Goodman
“Free-market libertarians and social democrats have lots to learn from this measured and thoughtful book. So, too, do all who stand in between these two ends of the liberal political spectrum who are troubled by contemporary populist trends.”
David Conway on Why Nationalism by Yael Tamir
“He does not duck the great writer’s aspiration to take on portentous topics, but stays grounded in sensual compulsions of ordinary life — hunger, pain, physical limitation, interpersonal relations and psychological eccentricities.”
Stoddard Martin on The Gospel According to Lazarus by Richard Zimler
“This is a book about the many lies we tell ourselves and others, and, rather than condemning liars outright, Gundar-Goshen is far more interested in the transgressive power that liars possess to fight inequality in an unjust world, and the perverse way in which lying can bring us love.”
Keren David on Liar by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
“Hollywood rewarded him with fame and money but he regarded movie-writing as the ‘dementia ward of literature’”.
Alan Montague on Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures by Adina Hoffman
“Englander says kaddish.com is his most Jewish book and I ended up thinking it was quite brilliant. Early on, I hadn’t been so sure. The crackling observations, jokes and one-liners come so relentlessly that I found it impossible to read more than a short chapter at a time.”
Jonathan Margolis on kaddish.com by Nathan Englander
“Andras Forgach’s book gives a fascinating insight into the cruelty and terrible human costs of post-war Communism: suicide attempts, people betraying their friends and loved ones, colleagues stabbing each other in the back; all set against a grey, urban background of tenement blocks and secret-service buildings.”
David Herman on The Acts of My Mother by Andras Forgarch
“[Corbyn] was described as staring and just shrugging his shoulders, yet this caricature speaks volumes and goes to the heart of his lack of understanding of the meaning of Socialism.”
Colin Shindler on Protest and Power: the Battle for the Labour Party by David Kogan
“While he does not exculpate or excuse Marx’s antisemitic rant, he seeks to put it into context, arguing that his attack on Christianity was even stronger than his indictment of Judaism and that fear of censorship made him use Judaism as a synonym for capitalism.”
Vernon Bogdanor on Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution by Shlomo Avineri
“It feels very hip and happening: his characters take soft drugs, drink organic soya milk lattes and go on Tinder for casual sex.”
David Herman on Fly Already by Etgar Keret
“It is one of history’s ironies that, in order to create the first ghetto, it was Christians who had to be expelled.”
Howard Cooper on Ghetto: the History of a Word by Daniel Schwartz
“This amazing sustained narrative by Lucy Ellman may be the tour de force of our era, indeed ‘the great American novel’ of now, arguably the greatest by a woman ever, or at the very least, a masterpiece.”
Stoddard Martin on Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman
“The bigger football gets, it seems, the darker many of the forces swilling through it have become.”
David Winner on The Age of Football by David Goldblatt
“Naomi Klein is a brilliant prose writer. Her language is clear, simple and direct, so that this book is no chore. Nor is it mere partisan lecturing or hectoring. Most readers will be able to forge a path through Klein’s intellectual logic towards her conclusion.”
Anne Garvey on On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein
“It is the last segment of the book that packs the most punch as Safran Foer draws on his recently deceased bubbe’s sacrifice to flee from Poland to escape the horrors of the Holocaust.”
Ben Weich on We Are the Weather by Jonathan Safran Foer
“Most political episodes in Ben-Gurion’s life have been expanded in a plethora of books and it is the details of the inner person that provide the main interest of this popular biography.”
Colin Shindler on A State At Any Cost by Tom Segev
“While Trump himself is not a Jew-hater,’ Guttenplan declares, Trump’s rhetoric and policies do empower Jew-haters — and haters in general.”
Colin Shindler on The Next Republic by D D Guttenplan
“Einstein was holed up in a hut near Cromer, calmly working on his scientific problems and smoking his pipe.”
Monica Porter on Einstein on the Run by Andrew Robinson
“Martin Goodman, steeped in both Jewish and classical sources, is the most significant historian of Jews and Judaism writing in the UK today, and one of the most significant in the world. As always, Goodman’s work is clear, precise and a pleasure to read.”
David Ruben on Josephus’s War, a Biography by Martin Goodman
“Sorkin… declares that the Nazi genocide and the establishment of Israel were mere ‘epiphenomena… Emancipation,’ he insists, ‘was, and remains, the principal event’.”
Bernard Wasserstein on Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries by David Sorkin
“Roseman’s book is a brilliant, humane and timely historical study… At the same time, it is a highly original meditation on goodness: where it comes from, how it is challenged and sustained, how we recognise it.”
Alun David on Lives Reclaimed by Mark Roseman
“Berenson’s skill in this eye-opening and timely book includes weaving into this local story the larger history of the European blood libel, and how it migrated into the New World — in the 1920s it was rife in Montreal.”
Howard Cooper on The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town by Edward Berenson
“From being a young father… after an arranged marriage, and becoming a rabbi, he progresses to coming out as transsexual and leaving the community.”
Julia Neuberger on Becoming Eve by Abby Stein
“Saper’s recall of the medieval morality imposed by the returning Ayatollah Khomeini (‘the Redeemer’) chills the spine. Doubly discriminated against as Jewish and female, her constrained life could be drawn straight from Margaret Atwood’s Testaments.”
Madeleine Kingsley on From Miniskirt to Hijab by Jacqueline Saper
