“Hillel Halkin has done a superb job in responding to these challenges in what is, in my view, his best book.”
“a thoroughly researched, carefully rendered biography that evokes the vanished world of golden age Spanish Jewry”
“Halkin’s greatest contribution is his nimble navigation of the twists and turns of Halevi’s turbulent life and the controversies that punctuate the many interpretations of his thought.”
“an appreciative, scholarly study of traditional popular song that goes into considerable and enlightening detail about the intermingling of black and Jewish popular music.”
“a poet’s witty and ruminative examination of how Jewish songwriters…used outsider status to gain perspective in forging a canon of sophisticated, quintessentially American songs in the pre-rock era”
“…an artfully written art biography that captures its subject in the same kaleidoscopic palette as Chagall painted.”
“Mr. Century’s strong narrative line and his interviews with Ross’s now aged younger brother help to snatch the sweet scientist with the cast iron chin from the waters of oblivion.”
“Barney Ross” is an intense biography. In barely 200 pages, Century has condensed all the essential information about tough kid Beryl Rasofsky, a Kohen (rabbinical royalty) who, in other eras, would have be destined for the Talmud.”
Simon Wiesenthal, painted in a new biography as a fame-seeking myth-maker, is also the man who insisted that the world face up to the Holocaust
Inspired by the hunger for books on Jewish subjects written in a lively, intelligent, and popular manner, Nextbook Press's Jewish Encounters Series brings together writers of the first rank with people and ideas and events from the Jewish past. The series, under the general editorship of Jonathan Rosen, is a collaboration between Nextbook Inc., devoted to the promotion of Jewish literature, culture, and ideas, and Schocken, with its storied backlist of Jewish classics. It is a sister organization to Tablet magazine.