Julian Levinson

Apr 26, 2024 | jewishbookcouncil.org | Michael Weingrad |Alan Mintz |Julian Levinson

Review By – April 26, 2024 In 2003, Arthur Miller looked back at a dark moment in Amer­i­can Jew­ish his­to­ry that he had dra­ma­tized in his 1945 nov­el, Focus. ​“The anti-Semi­tism I ran into all over the place was fierce,” Miller recalled of the World War II years in Amer­i­ca. ​“And yet there was no sign of any recog­ni­tion of it or acknowl­edge­ment of it in the pub­lic domain, not in nov­els, not in plays … I felt it had to be unearthed.

Jul 9, 2023 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Julian Levinson |Dara Horn |Yosef Lindell

Restless Books128 pp., $22 Simple Gimpl bills itself as “The Definitive Bilingual Edition” of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s signature short story. The subtitle’s portentous use of “definitive” is undone in cheeky fashion by the book’s shape and form. It is a colorful little pocket square of a paperback festooned with whimsical illustrations by Liana Finck that suggest what Marc Chagall might have produced if he were a latter-day New Yorker cartoonist.