The Newsletter of Fig Tree Books

July '25: Issue #68 --- Fredric D. Price, Founder & Publisher

Editor’s note: The June issue of Fig Tree Lit [https://conta.cc/3ZhUcGN] sparked a significant number of emails, two of which are included below. The first focuses of the articles by Thane Rosenbaum and Eve Barlow. The second included comments on Jews of Different Hues and two Essays, in addition to comments on what was written by Thane Rosenbaum and Eve Barlow. With the permission of the second letter writer, only the comments related to Thane Rosenbaum and Ever Barlow are included.

To the Editor:

“A monthly newsletter always risks being outdated by the time it comes out. Today’s (editorial note: June 5, 2025) Fig Tree Newsletter with articles by Thane Rosenbaum and Eve Barlow strikingly, blatantly and intentionally (I think) ignores the reality that former Israeli Prime Ministers, Jewish leaders like Eric Yoffie, hundreds of thousands of Israelis and simple followers of the daily news cycle see: the Israeli government and IDF is committing war crimes on a daily basis. 

“Yes, Hamas Is monstrous and criminal, but anyone looking for truth and wondering why Israel won’t allow journalists into Gaza must take the criminals in the Israeli government seriously when they advocate ethnic cleansing and starvation as a tool of war. Israeli bombing is now, by last year’s revised government policy, more indiscriminate than ever before as the number of civilian casualties, mostly women and children, mounts and Israel now even shoots at people trying to reach food distribution centers. Rosenbaum and Barlow talk about the truth and the Hamas-controlled narrative while completely ignoring Bibi’s government attempt to make Gaza completely uninhabitable as they also refuse to stop pogroms by West Bank settler fanatics.  

“We all agree that Hamas terrorism is awful and must support Israel’s attempts to correct the awful security failures of the government and the IDF on Oct. 7. We also have to be honest about what this government is doing. Israel’s conduct of the war has and will continue to increase anti-semitism globally and the only way to fight it is to find ways to stop the madness and madmen running Israel today. Unfortunately, Barlow and Rosenbaum, like AIPAC, have nothing to say about this and, in the name of supporting Israel’s self-defense, are contributing to Israel’s moral suicide and isolation in the world.”

Yoel Magid

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To the Editor:

“…and thank you for continuing to publish essays by Eve Barlow and Thane Rosenbaum, two voices that resonate with clarity in this world of spin and disinformation. I had never heard of Eve Barlow prior to the Hamas October 7 massacre, but saw one of her posts online and signed up for Blacklisted. She speaks what many liberal western Jews feel (and maybe say to themselves or family members) but are afraid to put their views in a public forum. I had assumed that she was Israeli as she leads with her jaw and doesn’t pull punches; I was startled to find out she is from Scotland and lives in the US, originally as a music critic. Wow, what a transformation. What stuck with me was the following: If you really care about the Palestinians in Gaza, you don’t even need to give a shit about the Israelis or the Jews (although you should if you’re claiming to be a humanitarian who believes in all human rights). But if you really care about the Gazans, you should care about the truth. You should stop empowering the Hamas narrative. Amen. Wish all the progressives would follow that advice. I can’t leave without mentioning Thane Rosenbaum’s book. I ordered it and having read so far only the Introduction (it is but 20 pages), I am hooked, which, I must admit, was a kind of epiphany for me, having been an Obama supporter and a regular reader of the New York Times. Unlike Barlow, Rosenbaum is someone who has been on the radar screen for many years and I have watched him shift from liberal to moderate, as anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, anti-intellectualism, and anti-commonsense-ism has overtaken universities and the majority of the Democratic party. His book is not an excuse and reflects his legal training. I have told friends who don’t want to take a deep dive into the book to check out his timely interview with Bernard-Henri Levy: https://jewishjournal.com/cover_story/374825/intellectual-warrior/…”

Sincerely,

M. Friedkline

JEWS OF DIFFERENT HUES: A pocket guide to the Jewish grandmothers of Mexico, By Sam Lin-Sommer

David Calderon Zonana is turning into a grandmother, they tell me. They laugh as they describe how their apartment is starting to resemble a grandmother’s. Their style of dress. Some of the recipes they cook.

We are chatting about Mexican Jewish matriarchs in a sunlit, plant-filled patio tucked between two old buildings. Calderon, who uses they/them pronouns, wears large, rimmed glasses and a navy blue shirt with a white drawing of a swordfish emblazoned across the front. A flat brimmed hat hangs off of the back of their neck by a drawstring.

In this cafe in Mexico’s City’s historic center, Calderon has already shown me plenty of grandmotherly concern. They have asked me whether I need any coffee, whether I might want to move to another cafe with more table space.

In the last few years, Calderon has spent enough afternoons chatting and cooking with Jewish abuelitas to produce 20 zines, each one an ode to another matriarch.

BOOK: On Democracies and Death Cults, by Douglas Murray

Eve Barlow writes: Today, I read cover-to-cover the new book by Douglas Murray:Democracies And Death Cults. I planned on beginning it today but once I started I was there in my reading chair sinking further into the fabric as hours went by and the color of the sky changed several times outside the window. And in the first 85 pages, I found that I couldn’t stop myself from bursting into tears, which is annoying because I thought I had stopped crying about October 7. No I hadn’t. It’s there. It’s right under my skin, waiting to be pinched.

Born in 1979 his first book came out in 2000 while he was an undergraduate at Oxford. Since then he has published three more full-length books – on politics, history and current affairs – as well as shorter works on free speech and defence.

In 2007 he founded the Centre for Social Cohesion (CSC), the first think-tank in Britain to study extremism and terrorism. The CSC subsequently became part of the Henry Jackson Society, where Murray held the position of Associate Director from 2011 to 2018.

SHORT STORY: Vagabond, by Larry Lefkowitz

As I sat down in my favorite Jerusalem restaurant just off Jaffa Road – favored because it served good food at moderate prices – my eye was caught by the sight of two men sitting at an adjoining table. One was wearing a suit. The second man, to my surprise, was wearing an old shirt and pants that looked like they had never been washed or pressed. Their owner’s hair was unkempt and his face made one want to turn away from it. The man looked like a beggar or homeless person. I wondered what the two men, so seemingly opposite in appearance, had in common. The well-dressed man seemed to be listening to the other man, who monopolized the conversation, the former nodding now and then with apparent appreciation and respect.

Larry Lefkowitz's stories, poetry, and humor have been widely published. His Jewish story collection "Enigmatic tales" is published by Fomite Press. His just published book "The Varieties of Jewish Experience" also just published by Fomite Press contains stories, a novella, and a humorous Yiddish glossary. The 17 stories are about golems, nun, rabbis, giant shrimp and woody Allen. The novella is about the trials of a writer in love with a woman who wants him to finish a novel of her late husband.

JEWS OF THE UNIVERSE: Introducing Vanessa Hidary,

by Elissa Wald

“Last night, just before I went onstage, I received a very hateful message from someone I’ve known since high school, with whom I was very close. This is a guy who was like a brother to me. And he went on this whole rant about me being, you know, the worst kind of white person — a Zionist, a white supremacist. It was pretty awful. I thought I’d kind of gotten to the point where I wasn’t as hurt by these things, but it just crushed me.”

NEW BOOKS FROM CENTRO PRIMO LEVI: The Renegade,

by Aiel Toaff and The Trunk, by Alberto Vigevani

FIG TREE BOOKS BACKLIST: My Mother's Son and Jacobo's

Rainbow, by David Hirshberg & Safekeeping, by Jessamyn Hope

All three books on sale as e-books for just $2.99

"My Mother's Son starts out as a story of a family's life in Jewish Boston and grows as big as a century. Fascism lurks. Polio carries off its prey. Only-in-Boston characters pop up. To wit: Murph Feldman, the Jew of Southie. Time rushes in only to roll back as the stories within stories reveal truths not only about one family and one city, but about America in the 1950s and, by extension, today. Hirshberg is a raconteur who feels no need to stop to get a sip of water." —Paul Goldberg, author of The Yid and 2017 Finalist—Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and 2016 Finalist - National Jewish Book Award Goldberg Prize for Debut Fiction

"Who you become, the author suggests, is an amalgam of who you know and the stories you assimilate. Readers will find connections here to Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and to Saul Bellow’s classic The Adventures of Augie March (1953).—Booklist (American Library Association), Starred Review

A beautiful novel set in the past but perfectly, scarily, relevant to our current moment.― Gary Shteyngart, author of Lake Success



Jacobo’s Rainbow is a sweeping examination of the unique buckle in time that was the ‘Sixties,’ told from the perspective of the ultimate outsider―a young man who was born and raised in the tiny New Mexico town of Arroyo Grande, a town so isolated, it didn’t even legally exist. Jacobo’s journey takes him from that remote enclave to a college campus, where he becomes immersed in the Free Speech movement, and to the battlefields of Vietnam. His insights and observations about society, his peers, bigotry and anti-Semitism are both trenchant and currently relevant to the culture wars and threats to free speech we see on our college campuses and society at large today. Jacobo’s Rainbow is a deeply moving, sensitive, and profound novel―a definite must-read.― Marcia Clark, author of Blood Defense and Final Judgment

“A summer on a kibbutz; a disparate cast of characters torn by their own past lives and the inescapable burdens of history; a plot driven by a valuable gold brooch crafted by a master goldsmith in the Middle Ages: from these seemingly ordinary materials Jessamyn Hope has wrought something wonderful. I don’t mean simply that her plot is compelling, utterly lucid, and deeply resonant, which it is; or that her troubled characters are created with both deep compassion and clear-eyed skepticism, which they are; or even that she writes brilliantly, which she does. What’s most wonderful about Safekeeping is the author’s uncanny sense of how much of the world can be understood by keen attention to its smallest particulars, and how meaningfulness will multiply when you refuse to force upon the reader your own personal meanings. Like the exquisite gold brooch that shimmers emblematically at its center, Safekeeping 

seems to glow with a rich patina of timelessness, the sign of true art. Listen, do yourself a huge favor, read this book.” — Mark Dintenfass, author of Old World, New World and A Loving Place