An alternately nostalgic, entertaining, and annoying portrait of what Joselit sees as the domestication, commercialization, and sentimentalization of American Jewish culture. Joselit (Our Gang, not reviewed) has combed an array of Jewish newspapers, memoirs, synagogue bulletins, and other documents to create a vast assemblage of facts about the transformation of Jewish ritual and religion in America. She details the evolution of the simple Jewish marriage ceremony into a copiously catered, highly theatrical ``affair''; the growth of Jewish consumer culture, from Bible dolls to bar mitzvah suits to designer Chanukah menorahs; and the devolution of the observance of kashruth into a yen for gefilte fish. The rise and fall of confirmation as an egalitarian alternative to the bar mitzvah, the development of advertising targeted to a Jewish market (exemplified by the ubiquitous Maxwell House Passover haggadah)—all are related in engaging detail. But Joselit's analysis is thin (she speaks of the ``promise of America'' and the clash between individualist American culture and community-based Jewish culture), leaving readers with a sense of nostalgia for the past, a patronizing attitude toward an era when divorce was referred to as a ``marital mishap,'' and irritation at the glib tone with which Joselit refers to intermarriage as ``the ultimate romantic escapade.'' In the end, a distasteful, homogenized portrait emerges of a Jewish community consisting of what Joselit calls the ``folk'' (a cultural grouping, not a class one) who think religion can be lively and fun, and a bunch of crabby rabbis (the ``elite'') who rant and rail over their materialism and abandonment of tradition. It is a spiritually bereft culture, in which the deli is visited more regularly than the synagogue and Chanukah is less a celebration of freedom than, as one woman put it in 1950, a ``major competitive winter sport.'' It was a culture that led to both higher rates of intermarriage and a search for spiritual renewal in the post-50s decades. Unfortunately, Joselit ends her tale too soon.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8090-2757-7
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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