Julia Klein

Jan 12, 2025 | pressherald.com | Julia Klein

In her mid-20th-century heyday, Perle Mesta inspired Irving Berlin’s “Call Me Madam,” a Broadway musical satirizing an American socialite’s posting as a European ambassador. The show drew conspicuously on Mesta’s reputation as “The Hostess With the Mostes’.” Characteristically, Mesta embraced the production and befriended its star, Ethel Merman. Renowned for her lavish bipartisan shindigs, Mesta was more than Washington’s premiere party giver.

Jan 2, 2025 | wsj.com | Julia Klein

Like “The Reader” (1995), the novel that put Mr. Schlink on the literary map, “The Granddaughter” engages with both historical trauma and generational bonds. It thematizes not only the aftershocks of the Holocaust but of Germany’s division into East and West—two societies, with distinct trajectories and cultures, reunited in 1990 but still not fully unified. Alternatingly wistful, frustrated and angry, the novel asks how love, tolerance and time might bridge those persistent gaps.

Dec 23, 2024 | latimes.com | Julia Klein

You might have heard of Lise Meitner. A native of Austria, she was the first woman to become a full professor of physics in Germany. She also helped discover nuclear fission. Yet the 1944 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for that accomplishment went solely to her longtime collaborator, Otto Hahn. Meitner battled misogyny and sexism at every stage of her illustrious career. But growing antisemitism and the 1933 Nazi takeover of Germany were an even higher-order problem.

Nov 15, 2024 | msn.com | Julia Klein

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Nov 15, 2024 | latimes.com | Julia Klein

In his groundbreaking 1980 account of the baby boomers, “Great Expectations,” Landon Y. Jones predicted that this generation would pioneer a new model for old age. The cohort born between 1946 and 1964 “promises to be relatively healthier, better educated, and more certain of its desires,” Jones wrote. “For the baby boomers, to be old may someday have all the possibilities of youth.”Someday has arrived. And Jones turns out to have been prescient about this generation’s forever-young inclinations.