Before email and social media, the best way to reach across the miles to share a brief, friendly greeting was the picture postcard. From the 1890s through the 1910s, the US, Great Britain, and Europe saw the Golden Era of the “postcard craze.” Over this twenty-year period, explains…
People of the Books: Reviews by Elyce Rae Helford
My Holocaust by Tova Reich (Harper, 2007)
It took me a long time to get around to reading Tova Reich’s My Holocaust. Fifteen years, to be precise. I knew the book was a satire, and reviews told me Reich held nothing back in her critique o…
Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, edited by Jules Chametzsky, John Felstiner, Hilene Flanzbaum, and Katharyn Heller (2001).
I confess I am not a fan of New Year’s Resolutions. Nonetheless, I do like to encourage myself to broaden my horizons at every opportunity. Therefore, …
The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Will Eisner
For those of us who appreciate Art Spiegelman’s Maus for its popularization of Holocaust survivor accounts to address a popular audience or for its impact on debates over the “proper” style and content of…
The Glass Plates of Lublin: Found Photographs of a Lost Jewish World.
Eds. Piotr Nazaruk, Lisa Newman, and Aaron Lansky. White Goat Press, 2022
Perhaps not all pictures are worth a thousand words, but when images reach us through the years of a lost world, they speak profoundly. The Yiddis…
People of the Books
People of the Books features reviews by Elyce Rae Helford, PhD, a professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. The column will feature books new and old, fiction and non-fiction, on all things Jewish. Helford, the descendant of Russian Jews on both sides of…
