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BLACKS AND JEWS

ALLIANCES AND ARGUMENTS

This angst-ridden compilation of essays reviews the last 30 years of intellectual cogitation about relations between blacks and Jews. Berman (editor of Debating PC, not reviewed) has selected 19 essays by well-known black and Jewish writers to create an essential ``literature'' of this ongoing dialogue. Divided into four rather vaguely titled sections (``Several Controversies,'' ``Philosophical Observations,'' etc.), the collection focuses on the social history of interrelations between black anti-Semitism and Jewish racism in America. While a half-dozen pieces here are new, many are classics in the field, such as James Baldwin's 1967 essay ``Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White'' and Norman Podhoretz's 1963 article, ``My Negro Problem—and Ours.'' Other notable contributors include Cynthia Ozick, Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Leon Wieseltier, bell hooks, and Shelby Steele. Among the most common subjects are: the ``golden days'' of black-Jewish cooperation during the civil rights era; the effect of white flight on urban black communities; the growing economic schism between blacks and Jews; black sympathy for Palestinians under Israeli rule; the Crown Heights riots of 1991; and frequent anti-Semitic remarks made by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. While each essay on its own is certainly valuable, the collection does not add up to more than the sum of its parts; Berman neglects to draw any conclusions from the black-Jewish debate. Two of the volume's original pieces, however, stand out. Joe Woods's ``The Problem Negro and Other Tales,'' a spicy critique of Podhoretz's insecurity about his own Jewishness, is a welcome exception to the generally analytical tone, and Julius Lester, in ``The Lives People Live,'' is the only author to outline a constructive course of action to resolve current problems plaguing black-Jewish relations. A worthwhile addition to the reference shelf of volumes that debate contentious ethnic issues but proffer no solutions.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-385-31117-6

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Delacorte

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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 Yorker staff 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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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