JEWDAR
NON-FICTION / BIOGRAPHY The origin of influencing
WRITING ABOUT reading has long been a pas- sion for this former New Yorke r film critic, re- flected in his 1996 bestseller Great Books, which chronicled his middle-aged engagement with the Western canon through courses at Columbia Uni- versity. Subsequently, he got attention for Amer- ican Sucker — a memoir about losing big on the stock market — and a polemic about the prev- alence of Snark . Now that he’s into his eighties, a lifetime of thoughts on the impact of Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Nor- man Mailer are synthesized into a volume about how music, film, feminism, and literature were influenced by a common heritage.
EMINENT JEWS: BERNSTEIN, BROOKS, FRIEDAN, MAILER by David Danby Henry Holt, April 8
NON-FICTION / BIOGRAPHY Considering this literary life
NON-FICTION / BIOGRAPHY The rabbi who rode on the bus
WAS THE ALTER EGO of Samuel Langhorne Cle- mens an antisemite or not? The question has been bandied about ever since Twain penned the 1899 essay “Concerning the Jews,” based on his observa-
ON THE HEELS of the sixtieth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr. leading 8,000 protesters on a march from Selma to Montgomery comes a short book about the kippah-clad rab- bi who joined on the front lines. Born in Warsaw in 1907, Hes- chel settled in Cincinnati in 1940 to helm the Hebrew Union
tions about how Jews were treated in the Habsburg Empire. While he called Jewish people unpatriotic for not joining the U.S. military — even though they did in a greater
MARK TWAIN Ron Chernow Penguin Press May 3
College of Reform Judaism, then moved to New York for a posting with the Conserva- tive movement’s Jewish Theological Sem- inary. Susannah Heschel, who followed in his scholarly footsteps — and introduced the idea of adding an orange to the Passover seder plate, as a symbol of inclusion — en- dorsed this book by writing the foreword.
per capita number than other groups — he later re- tracted that statement. This new biography by Cher- now (whose earlier tome on Alexander Hamilton di- rectly inspired the stage musical) comes in at exact- ly 1,200 pages, covering Twain’s birth shortly after Halley’s Comet appeared in 1835 to the death that came soon after its next appearance 74 years later — as the increasingly eccentric writer predicted.
MY LEGS WERE PRAYING: A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ABRAHAM JOSEPH HESCHEL Or N. Rose with Rabbi Dov Peretz Elkins Monkfish Publishing May 16
68 SPRING 2025
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