Jesse Tisch

Jan 14, 2025 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Jesse Tisch |Akiva Schick |Joseph Epstein |Abraham Socher

Free Press 304 pp., $29.99 Simon & Schuster 464 pp., $20.99 Memoir is risky business. Its reputation? Slightly dubious. Its vices? Vanity, indiscretion, omission. Don’t trust it, said Orwell, unless it reveals something shameful. Even then, you might wonder why someone probes their past, poking around in the attic of their psyche. Why not let demons rest? If anyone understands these hazards, it’s Joseph Epstein, a great practitioner and skeptic of personal writing.

Sep 30, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Abraham Socher |Akiva Schick |Jesse Tisch

One day when I was young and easy under the red-roof tiles and as happy with my growing family as the Hollywood Hills were green (when you could see them through the smog), I walked up to the corner of Sherbourne and Pico on some small errand and ran into a guy I’ll call Charles. We weren’t exactly friends, but we’d met the previous year in Jerusalem.

Jul 15, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Jesse Tisch |Akiva Schick |Sol Stern

Oxford University Press 312 pp., $24.95 In 1939, William Butler Yeats was placed on trial. The charge: spreading false ideas, namely the absurd belief “that art ever makes anything happen.” It was, of course, a made-up trial—Yeats was already dead. It was conceived by W. H. Auden, his fellow poet, who then famously declared that “poetry makes nothing happen.” For many, Auden’s statement was a goad: Can writing, in fact, change society?

Nov 30, 2023 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Jesse Tisch |Akiva Schick |Matti Friedman

As authors go, Herbert Gold was unique: prolific, protean, if never quite famous. Gold, who died last week at ninety-nine, wrote a bit of everything: essays, poetry, fiction. His best-known novel, Salt (1963), was variously compared to The Adventures of Augie March and Philip Roth’s early work (“Gold had learned from Roth’s mistakes,” a critic wrote). On top of that, he was a mensch, as I learned last November when I visited him in San Francisco.