Jewniverse Articles Archive - Page 34 of 174

The Yiddish Theater Star Who Disappeared Into an Anti-Stalinist Superhero

Paul Goldberg’s provocatively-titled novel The Yid (Picador) starts out with a middle-of-the-night visit from the Stalinist-era Soviet police to the Moscow home of Solomon Levinson, an elderly has-been actor of the Yiddish theater. Their job: to make him disappear. But things don’t go as planned, and in an elaborately choreographed fight, the elderly actor manages […]

By Matthue Roth

This 1936 Illustrated German Children’s Book Makes Anti-Semitism Look So Cute

How did Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic ideas transform from the ravings of an outsider to official policy? A recent exhibit at the New-York Historical Society,“Anti-Semitism 1919-1939,” asked this question, and a 1936 children’s book supposedly about a fox ventures an answer. Trust No Fox was one of three children’s books published by the Nazi weekly Der Stuermer in […]

A Mother-Daughter Lower East Side Yiddish Pregnancy Tale

Throughout Jennifer S. Brown’s debut novel Modern Girls, it’s easy to think you’ve been here before, in a 1930s Lower East Side that’s recognizable from such chroniclers as Henry Roth and Irving Howe. But her predecessors might have only hinted at the events that are the core of Brown’s story, a mother-daughter pregnancy with none […]