The golden age of Jewish American literature began with a short story: In Dreams Begin Responsibilities by Delmore Schwartz. Since then, from Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus and Bellow’s Mosby’s Memoirs to Cynthia Ozick and Grace Paley, the short story has arguably been the great Jewish American literary genre.

Edie Middlestein is eating herself to death.

When we first meet Edie she is five years old, “disarmingly solid”, with an appetite for “salty liverwurst and red onion on warm rye bread.” Sixty years later, she is morbidly obese and diabetic.

This biography of the most reviled and simultaneously idolised of Israeli politicians was published in Hebrew five years ago. Now stodgily translated into English and carelessly edited, at the end of its 588 pages of text and copious notes it leaves the reader little clearer about what made Begin tick.

With the relentless rise of neuroscience, it is becoming increasingly difficult to hold on to the complexity of subjective experience. If we can show that seeing unknown people by the bedside, or hearing voices in an empty room, is caused by damage to the brain, then, one could ask, is that not enough?

One of Liverpool’s leading Jewish figures has been tasked by the Prime Minister to deliver what is claimed to be the UK’s largest planned national business event since the 1950s.

Introduce toddlers to the eco-friendly message of Tu Bishvat (January 25) with Thank You Trees, a board book by Gail Langer Karowski and Marilyn E. Gootman (Kar-Ben, £4.99). The rhymes are not exactly Dr Seuss, but Kristen Balouch’s friendly illustrations will stimulate discussion.

The Misunderstanding is a meditation on the nature of unhappiness. Denise is in love with Yves who hates himself. As Denise becomes infected with a sense of self-destruction following Yves’s fall from financial grace, her urbane mother advises her to take a second suitor. She picks her raffish young cousin Jaja, who plays the ardent lover to her coy beloved.

A conservative estimate of the number of victims of mass murder since the beginning of the 20th century is 83 million. Add the victims of deliberate famine and the estimated total rises to between 127 and 175 million.