Books

'One Book' Author Takes Readers Back in History

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Philadelphia's "One Book, One Jewish Community" program officially kicks off Sunday with a discussion led by this year's selected author, Mitchell James Kaplan. The Auerbach Central Agency for Jewish Education/Jewish Outreach Partnership announced that Kaplan's first novel, By Fire, By Water, would be the focus of this year's program before it was even published in May. That was quite a...

Books

The 'Turning Point'

Not the movie, exactly, but the moment of truth for two filmmakers

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Robert Leiter

From a young age, I was a movie nut, watching whatever was on TV -- slashed to bits, I learned later, to accommodate commercials -- while also attending the neighborhood cinema at least once each week. Movie-going intensified in my teens as I added uncut Hollywood classics and European art films that were being shown at the revival houses that...

Books

A Portrait of Profound Evil and Its Opposite

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Robert Leiter

The fate of Hungary's Jews during the Holocaust stands out as particularly tragic. I characterize it as such, knowing that there were millions of Jewish tragedies throughout Hitler's Europe, simply because, for so much of the war, Hungary's Jews had an odd, protected status, albeit through a confluence of quirks, both historic and haphazard. But following the German defeat at...

Books

'The Germany of Her Time'

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Robert Leiter

The Jewish literary world -- from time immemorial -- has been a primarily male province. There were exceptions throughout history, of course, but these were also always exceptions that proved the rule. Only recently -- meaning within the last 35 or 40 years, with the feminist movement that had its roots in 1960s activism, and flowered in the '70s and...

Books

'An Ongoing Conversation'

By:

Robert Leiter

Beginning last year, Sir Jonathan Sacks -- Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth and a well-known and remarkably prolific author -- began a Torah commentary project that's shaping up to be a significant event in the Jewish world. Published by Maggid Books and the Orthodox Union, Exodus: The Book of Redemption has just appeared, having...