The 1930s are fondly remembered as the beginning of a golden age for Hollywood. The studios were dominated by Jews who operated a highly sophisticated oligopoly - the "dream factory"- and churned out as many as a film a day.
It can't have been easy being Saul Bellow's son. He was a towering genius, a womaniser, sharp of tongue and hard of mind, yet with a fragile core that shrank away from the type of personal criticism he was so adept at dispensing. Bellow's heart and mind were consumed by his work, producing novels that helped define post-war US literature.
The Chief Rabbi may now represent less than half of British Jews but no communal office attracts greater interest. In the third of his studies of the chief rabbinate, former JC Judaism editor Dr Meir Persoff looks at how six of its incumbents were chosen, from Nathan Adler in 1844 to Lord Sacks.
If you buy only one quirky, surreal collection of comedy short stories about relationships this year, make it Simon Rich’s The Last Girlfriend on Earth (Serpent’s Tail, £9.99).
Frank Sinatra’s daughter Nancy once released a song called, These Boots are Made for Walking. Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger’s book, Jews and Words, could have been sub-titled, These Books are Made for Talking.
It was perhaps inevitable that the reigning queen of moral-dilemma fiction would one day turn her attention to the Holocaust.
In her career so far — 20 novels and counting — American writer Jodi Picoult has delved into witchcraft, gun crime, suicide pacts and teenage cancer, not to mention the Amish and Native American communities.
Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions
By Stephen Frosh
Have you ever seen a ghost? Or felt that an event in your past needed laying to rest? Or had a strong premonition something was going to happen before it actually did? Or caught sight of your reflection in a shop window and for a moment failed to recognise yourself?
Deliberations on our individuality, our place in the world — whether or not our attitudes towards social, political and religious responsibilities offer acceptable meanings to life — have been major themes in literature since Antiquity.
Helen Schulman’s fifth novel, This Beautiful Life, (Atlantic, £7.99), set in contemporary Manhattan, is a bold exploration of a family at breaking point, with themes of sex, love and morality.
