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Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew, by Jeremy Dauber. Yale University Press, 2023.
I have lost track of the number of times I’ve watched Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. I can recite numerous scenes verbatim, and my best friend from high school and I still have competitive quote-offs. I got…
David Baddiel, Jews Don’t Count: How Identity Politics Failed One Particular Identity. HarperCollins, 2021.
Last month, I reviewed Deborah Lipstadt’s Antisemitism: Here and Now, praising its accessibility and care for its audience’s sensibilities and commitments. This month, I t…
Before discovering the short, poignant book of art and photographs entitled Sara Berman’s Closet, I’d never heard of Sara Berman. A quick internet search led me to two living Sara Bermans, one a British fashion designer and the other a philanthropist and former editor of The Forward. Nei…
Zangwill, Israel. The Melting-Pot (1909). Available free via The Gutenberg Project at gutenberg.org.
First performed in 1908 and published a year later, British Jewish author Israel Zangwill’s play The Melting-Pot is probably best known today for popularizing its titular metaphor for …
Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us by Kate Bornstein Vintage, 2016.
In a recent tweet, Jewish American author, playwright, performance artist, and activist Kate Bornstein advised,“Tell a trans person that you love them. Do it today. We need it.” Well, I love you, Kate, and…
An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin by Gad Beck (translated by Allison Brown), University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is held each year on January 27, to commemorate the date when the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by th…
Before email and social media, the best way to reach across the miles to share a brief, friendly greeting was the picture postcard. From the 1890s through the 1910s, the US, Great Britain, and Europe saw the Golden Era of the “postcard craze.” Over this twenty-year period, explains…
People of the Books: Reviews by Elyce Rae Helford
My Holocaust by Tova Reich (Harper, 2007)
It took me a long time to get around to reading Tova Reich’s My Holocaust. Fifteen years, to be precise. I knew the book was a satire, and reviews told me Reich held nothing back in her critique o…
Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, edited by Jules Chametzsky, John Felstiner, Hilene Flanzbaum, and Katharyn Heller (2001).
I confess I am not a fan of New Year’s Resolutions. Nonetheless, I do like to encourage myself to broaden my horizons at every opportunity. Therefore, …
The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Will Eisner
For those of us who appreciate Art Spiegelman’s Maus for its popularization of Holocaust survivor accounts to address a popular audience or for its impact on debates over the “proper” style and content of…
The Glass Plates of Lublin: Found Photographs of a Lost Jewish World.
Eds. Piotr Nazaruk, Lisa Newman, and Aaron Lansky. White Goat Press, 2022
Perhaps not all pictures are worth a thousand words, but when images reach us through the years of a lost world, they speak profoundly. The Yiddis…
People of the Books
People of the Books features reviews by Elyce Rae Helford, PhD, a professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. The column will feature books new and old, fiction and non-fiction, on all things Jewish. Helford, the descendant of Russian Jews on both sides of…
