In World War II-Era North Carolina, A Haven for German Jewish Artists and Academics
By Charles Darwent for Jewish Book CouncilInterviewed in 1967, Josef Albers, nearing eighty, was asked why he had spent nearly two decades at a small liberal arts school in North Carolina, having previously been a Meister at the Bauhaus (and would later become head of the design department at Yale). After a measured pause, Albers replied, “My gratitude to Black Mountain, [that] they had saved us from the Nazis.” His wife, Anni, added quietly, “In fact, we had to leave because of my background.” On both counts, they were not alone.
Inspired by Sydney Taylor’s One-of-a-Kind Book
By Gloria Goldreich for Hadassah Magazine
All-of-a-Kind Family Hanukkah By Emily Jenkins. Illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky.
All of-a-Kind Family Hanukkah is a one-of-a-kind book, capturing all the delights of Sydney Taylor’s classic story of five spirited sisters, “all girls—all of a kind.” In Jenkin’s new adaptation, it is 1912 and the family is preparing to celebrate the Festival of Lights in their tenement apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The neighborhood throbs with excitement.
Hanukkah Reads
Bellow, His Biographers, and the “Quivering Schmucks”
By David Mikics for Jewish Review of Books
Saul Bellow’s books, admitted his admirer Barney Singer, attract “an awful lot of nuts, a lot of quivering schmucks. . . . But I think I took the cake.” Singer, a young historian at the University of British Columbia, said he read Herzog at least a thousand times during the 1970s. He wrote Bellow hundreds of letters, often containing freewheeling accounts of his own love life (“all of a sudden, broad-wise, it doesn’t rain but it pours”). About twice a year Bellow would send Singer a brief note or a few lines on a postcard. One of his letters read, “No wonder you like Herzog—you resemble him, being always after yourself, a kind of self-persecution. Objectively, that’s funny. Sub., not.”
Combating Anti-Semitism: A Reading List
The Prosen People for Jewish Book CouncilThe following is an excerpt from the 2019 issue of Paper Brigade, the Jewish Book Council's annual literary journal. You can pre-order the issue here.
Amid the recent upsurge of anti-Semitism, we asked prominent authors of recent or forthcoming nonfiction to recommend a book for this list. The breadth of topics and time periods covered by the works below attests to the insidiousness of anti-Semitism, but also to the impressive range of scholarship devoted to examining and overcoming it. Even the spelling of "anti-Semitism"/"antisemitism" is currently under scrutiny; to reflect this, the recommenders’ chosen spellings of the word have been left intact.