Books

The Sun in the Firmament

Franklin Roosevelt, 'his Jews' and the tragedy of the Holocaust

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When I interviewed Samuel G. Freedman back in 1996 about his book The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved From Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond , he relayed an anecdote that has stayed with me. He spoke of his Uncle Seymour's Bar Mitzvah ceremony, and how family lore had it that, as his uncle carried the Torah around the...

Books

'A Historical Sensation'

By:

Robert Leiter

Shmuel Feiner begins his new biography, Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity , published by Yale University Press, with two anecdotes, which he's linked in an effort to define the essence of his subject and the contour of the man's life. He begins with a summer night in 1780. Mendelssohn is out walking in Berlin with his wife and several of...

Books

Then They Came

... taking dreams, lives, everything with them

By:

Robert Leiter

SPEAKING VOLUMES You can know a person for many years, speak to him, see him walking through the neighborhood, even know a crucial fact about him -- that he is a Holocaust survivor -- and yet you can discover, in a matter of moments, that you know nothing about him at all. Such has been the case with my relationship...

Books

A Blow Against Elitism

By:

Robert Leiter

It's a safe bet that most Philadelphians, even those who have never stepped foot into the Barnes Foundation's original home on the Main Line, would say that the bulk of the paintings in that famous collection have solely to do with French Impressionism -- Renoir, Matisse, Cézanne, Monet, Degas. Such a response would likely be due to all the media...

Books

Swing Time

Dorothy Fields' phrasing gave an irrepressible spin to famous melodies

By:

Robert Leiter

In the male-dominated world of Tin Pan Alley song writing, especially in its heyday in the 1920s and '30s, lyricist Dorothy Fields was one of the few women to triumph and be taken seriously by her peers and the public. Her name might not ring bells, but most people of a certain age or with a certain interest would likely...