Joshua Barton

Jul 15, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Agnieszka Traczewska |Shai Secunda |Joshua Barton |Dara Horn

There are hardly any women in A Vanished World, Roman Vishniac’s classic postwar album of the ill-fated European Jews he photographed in the 1930s. With their nostalgic and elegiac quality, those pictures—more black than white, more religious than secular, and more masculine than feminine—established a way of seeing and photographing Orthodox Jews, especially Hasidim, as a pious, almost premodern, cadre of men and boys.

Jul 15, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Daniel Schwartz |Joshua Barton

Ayin Press 309 pp., $22.95 Shaul Magid is one of the most wide-ranging, provocative, and prolific scholars of Hasidism and modern Jewish thought at work today. He is also a leading voice of the American Jewish left. A recent widely read New York Times article about the anti-Zionism and diasporism among young Jews leads with an account of the launch party for his new book of essays, The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance.

Jul 15, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Samantha Pickette |Joshua Barton |Dara Horn

Viking 992 pp., $47 If there is one theme that ties together Barbra Streisand’s new memoir, My Name Is Barbra, it is control. There is the complete creative control she exercised over her albums, from songs to artwork—a feat guaranteed through a deal with Columbia Records in 1962 that sustained Streisand’s music career through six decades and thirty-four number-one albums. She also had complete control over her television performances and live concerts, which she has avoided . . .

Jul 15, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Joshua Barton |Dara Horn

The fat man sails through the air on a trout, a pot of fire dangling from his pole. Seated behind him is a woman in pink. Their destination is the city center, where fish vendors sell raw herring, to be eaten standing, held by the tail and lowered into your mouth. The trio’s progenitor looms nearby. Turned to metal, Hieronymus Bosch stares into space, palette tilted in one hand, thrusting a brush into his waist with the other. He is deciding how to paint his latest nightmare.