Benjamin Weiner

Apr 26, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Benjamin Weiner |Akiva Schick |Yehudah Mirsky |Shai Held

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 560 pp., $35 At five o’clock in the afternoon, in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom finds himself in a Dublin pub, arguing over the meaning of life with a band of incredulous Christians.

Aug 3, 2023 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Benjamin Weiner |Akiva Schick |Michah Gottlieb

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall, and Simon Emanuel Walt Disney Pictures, 154 minutes In 1981, a creative team of three and a half Jews and the maker of Star Wars rendered one of the top action masterpieces in American cinema. Conceived in homage to old B-movie serials, Raiders of the Lost Ark raised this campy genre to sublime new heights.

Jul 9, 2023 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Benjamin Weiner |David Biale

In the mainstream of Jewish collective memory, Jacob Frank was portrayed as an egomaniac- al and depraved ignoramus, a false messiah, and a cynical serial convert—first to Islam, then Christianity. More recently, however, he has become the subject of radical reappraisal, most notably in Nobel Prize–winner Olga Tokarczuk’s novel The Books of Jacob, which depicts Frank as an eighteenth-century forerunner of a multicultural Poland and modern sexual liberation.