Book Reviews

Shadow Strike: Inside Israel’s Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power Yaakov Katz May 2019 St. Martin’s, 320 pages ISBN: 978-1-250-19127-4 Shadow Strike is a must read for followers of Israel’s military history, as well as for those that follow serious world...

Jewish summer camp is such a crucial part of the American Jewish experience that many Jewish adults, even in their older age, likely remember the names of many of the kids in their cabins from when they were 11 years old. One of those cabins more than 60 years ago...

Dear Zealots(Letters from a Divided Land) Amos Oz Translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018 140 pages The late (What a loss!) Amos Oz’s last literary gem, Dear Zealots (Letters from a Divided Land), relies on his previously...

Richmond author shares personal and universal stories in new book Erin Mahone Motivational Press, 2017 Reviewed by Amy Zelenka Did you ever feel like you were living in that famous idiom: the inmates are running the asylum? Well, Erin Mahone, in her new book, If You...

Tragedy impacts generations Jenna Blum Harper Collins Publishing | New York, New York Reviewed by Lynn Woods In The Lost Family, author Jenna Blum explores how tragic grief and loss can impact a family for generations. Years have passed since Peter Rashkin, chef and...

Perfect for baseball and history fans Carrie Jones Kar-Ben Publishing | Minneapolis, MN Reviewed by Sam Levin I had the opportunity to read a great book called, The Spy Who Played Baseball. It is about how Moe Berg played baseball and was a spy. Nobody expected Moe to...

Tragedy Impacts Generations Jenna Blum | The Lost Family: A Novel Harper Collins Publishing New York, New York In The Lost Family, author Jenna Blum explores how tragic grief and loss can impact a family for generations. Years have passed since Peter Rashkin, chef and...

This one’s for every grandparent Unconditional Love: A Guide for Navigating the Joys and Challenges of Being a Grandparent Today. Jane Isay Harper, March 6, 2018 Reviewed by Alene Jo Kaufman It’s hard to read a book when one’s head is continually nodding up and down,...

An unfortunate topic The Opposite of Hate: A Field Guide to Repairing Our Humanity Sally Kohn Workman Publishing, 2018 Wendy Juren Auerbach To be honest, the copy of The Opposite of Hate: A Field Guide to Repairing Our Humanity by Sally Kohn languished on my pile of...

Memoir meets financial guide This Is The Year I Put My Financial Life In Order John Schwartz Penguin Random House LLC, 2018 Money is often an overwhelming and stressful topic. While some people love discussing financial matters, others cringe at the thought of...

Violins of Hope (Violins of the Holocaust-Instruments of Hope and Liberation in Mankind’s Darkest Hour) James A. Grymes Harper Perennial, 2014 319 page, $15.99 Author James A. Grymes is a noted professor of musicology at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte who...

The Devil’s Diary: Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich Robert K. Wittman and David Kinney Harper,513 pages, $35 The Devil’s Diary of interconnected significant dramas is an invaluable addition to the continued growth of Holocaust literature and...

Inside the Middle East Avi Melamed Skyhorse Publishing 2016 374 pages, $26.99 Dennis Ross was astonished to realize that senior White House, State, and Defense officials had little or no knowledge of what transpired in previous administrations’ relationships with...

Operation Paperclip (The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought  Nazi Scientists to America) Annie Jacobsen Little, Brown and Company, 2014 575 pages, $30  Author Annie Jacobsen, a Princeton University graduate, already proved her superb investigative and writing...

Doomed to Succeed The U.S.-Israeli Relationship  from Truman to Obama Dennis Ross Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2015 474pp., $30 ISBN 978-0-374-14146-2  Dennis Ross must be doing something right. He has been criticized by both israelis and Palestinians, by...

Nathan’s Famous: The First Hundred Years William Handwerker with Jayne A. Pearl Morgan James, 2016 192 pages, $17.95 Paper Famous Nathan Lloyd Handwerker and Gil Reavill Flatiron Books, 2016 306 pages, $26.99 As a child growing up in New York during the Great...

The Seven Good Years: A Memoir Etgar Keret Riverhead Books, Penguin Random House, 2015 171 pages, $26.95  Last spring, Etgar Keret’s The Seven Good Years, appeared in my mailbox. The cover and press release promised a fun read, so i gave it a try. After the first...

The Morning They Came For Us (Dispatches From Syria) Janine Di Giovanni New York: Liveright Publishing 206 pages, $25.95 The Morning They Came For Us is an important book with lasting consequence by author Janine Di Giovanni, award-winning (including two Amnesty...

A Rage For Order—The Middle East in Turmoil: From Tahrir Square to ISIS Robert F. Worth Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016 259 pages, $26 ISBN978-0-374-25294-6 When Robert Kaplan published his collection of articles, Balkan Ghosts, in 1995, it was immediately recognized...

Three Minutes in Poland (Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film) Glenn Kurtz Farrar, Strauss and Girioux 415 pages, $33 It began on July 23, 1938, almost a year before the outbreak of WWll in the European theatre, when David and Liza Kurtz from Brooklyn, New...

Celebrate Elizabeth Kurtz To benefit Emunah of America Feldheim Format 35 pages, $34.99 Four-pound recipe books, however gorgeously illustrated, are not usually my favorite. However, this one caught your reviewer’s eye, first, because the proceeds were going to...

Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story Matti Friedman Algonquin Chapel Hill, 2006 243 pages, $25.95 ISBN 978-1-61620-458-7 The least knowledgeable military planner understands the advantage of holding “the high ground.” Using this rationale, young men (and now women) have...

The War Reporter Martin Fletcher St Martin’s Press, 2015 306pp., $25.99 Martin Fletcher, former NBC Middle East correspondent and Tel Aviv Bureau chief, won the American National Book Award in 2010 for Walking Israel: A Personal Search for the Soul of a Nation and...

Leaving Iran: Between Migration and Exile Farideh Goldin Athabasca University Press, 2016 291pp., $22.95(paper) ISBN 978-1-77199-137-7(pbk) 1-177199-138-4 (pdf) 1-177199-1-137-1(epub) Leaving Iran, 13 years after Wedding Song, reminds one of a reunion with a college...

Pastrami on Rye An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli Ted Merwin New York University Press, 2015 189pp. plus notes ISBN 978-0-8147-6031-4 “I’ll have what she’s having!” Who doesn’t remember that line from Rob Reiner’s 1989 hit When Harry Met Sally? No current book...

An Improbable Friendship: The Remarkable Lives of Ruth Dayan and Raymonda Tawil and Their 40-Year Mission to Build Understanding Between Their Peoples Anthony David Arcade Publishing, 2015 312 pages As we observe the tide of rising rage and violence in Israel,...

Myths of the Oil Boom Steve A. Yetiv Oxford University Press, 2015 251 pages, $29.95 ISBN 978-0-19-021269-8 Does anyone remember (only yesterday?) when “unleaded regular” gasoline approached $4 a gallon? Just this summer, people were grumbling that prices were...

The Sea Beach Line Ben Nadler Fig Tree Books, 2015 224 pages, $15.95 Author Ben Nadler has created a novel steeped in Judaica, yet a mystery. Izzy Edel, not quite wasted on drugs, determines to search for his father, reported deceased, but possibly alive. What follows...

The Greatest Jewish-American Lover in Hungarian History Michael Blumenthal Etruscan Press, 2014 218 pages Michael Blumenthal has been called “one of the natural poets of his generation” by no less than the late Irish poet Seamus Heaney, a winner of the Nobel Prize in...

How About Never Is Never Good For You? My Life in Cartoons Bob Mankoff Henry Holt and Company 285pp, $32 ISBN 978-0-8050-9591-3 Cartoon: Three men: Man on the left is wearing a deerstalker (yes, deerstalker) hat; man on the right is an older man; man in the middle is...