Spring into Action with Canuck Comedy and Quirky Cookbooks

The Studio

(Apple TV)

Premieres March 26, 2025

SETH ROGEN and creative partner Evan Goldberg took the cinematic comedy scene by storm in 2007 with Superbad, a screenplay based on their own high school experiences in Vancouver. Seven years later, their political satire The Interview, about a bungled assassination attempt on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, had its theatrical release scuttled due to pressures from North Korea accompanied by a hacking of Sony Pictures — and Rogen became seen as a less bankable star. Clearly, he realized, this meant it was time for him and Goldberg to go deep on satirizing the uncertain state of movie studios in a streaming tv series. Episodes will roll out weekly through May. Marc Weisblott

The Amateur

In theatres April 11, 2025

ROBERT LITTELL’S SPY NOVEL about a rogue CIA cryptographer trying to escape Czechoslovakia after killing the terrorists who killed his wife was first made into a Canadian movie in 1981. This new adaptation concedes that the Iron Curtain may be long gone, but argues you can still avenge a murder by blackmailing federal agents. Rami Malek plays the title character, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel star Rachel Brosnahan plays his wife. In Jewish writing trivia: Littell’s first book credit was 1969’s If Israel Lost the War, and former prime minister Shimon Peres recruited him to co-write For the Future of Israel, about the Oslo negotiations. In further evidence of eclecticism: earlier this year he published Bronshtein in the Bronx, inspired by Leon Trotsky’s pre-Russian Revolution visit to New York. Marc Weisblott

Gursha: Timeless Recipes for Modern Kitchens, from Ethiopia, Israel, Harlem, and Beyond by Beejhy Barhany and Elisa Ung

(Knopf)

April 1, 2025

BEEJHY BARHANY, owner of the Tsion Cafe in the Sugar Hill neighbourhood of Harlem, was spurred by post-October 7 antisemitic vandalism to secure kosher certification for her decade-old New York eatery. Her cookbook includes café menu items like shiro wat, gomen, and injera (chickpea stew, braised collard greens, and fermented teff flatbread, respectively) alongside recipes for Yemeni pancakes and jollof rice from West Africa, Sudanese doughnuts, and Queen of Sheba chocolate cardamom cake. Profiles of fellow members of the Beta Israel community of Ethiopian Jews who found a new home in Harlem round out the book. Marc Weisblott

Arthurs: Home of the Nosh by Raegan Steinberg, Alexandre Cohen, and Evelyne Eng

(Appetite by Random House)

May 6, 2025

MONTREAL has a luncheonette whose existence was inspired by the tastes of one man: Arthur Steinberg. After he died, in 2006, Steinberg’s daughter Raegen was driven to pursue a culinary career in his honour. Working in restaurants led her to meet her future husband; the couple started a catering business that pivoted into Arthurs Nosh Bar in the proto-hipster neighbourhood of Saint-Henri. Their cookbook covers everything the eatery is known for: syrniki pancakes, roasted lamb shoulder with saffron, and the dafina dish that originated as a Moroccan slow-cooker staple for Shabbat. Marc Weisblott

Off Menu by Amy Rosen

(ECW Press)

June 17, 2025

A FIXTURE of Toronto food journalism (she recently contributed an essay about matzah balls to the anthology What We Talk About When We Talk About Dumplings) is trying her hand at a beach read. The premise: twenty-something protagonist Ruthie Cohen’s bubbe’s has left her an inheritance of $62,863.42 with one instruction: “Follow your passion, Dollface.” This inspires her to learn the art of French cuisine in classes where she meets an unattainable object of desire, all while dealing with the prospect of reuniting with an earlier vacation fling. Presumably there’s some cooking in the story, too. Marc Weisblott

Mark Twain by Ron Chernow

(Penguin Press)

May 3, 2025

WAS THE ALTER EGO of Samuel Langhorne Clemens an antisemite or not? The question has been bandied about ever since Twain penned the 1899 essay “Concerning the Jews,” based on his observations about how Jews were treated in the Habsburg Empire. While he called Jewish people unpatriotic for not joining the U.S. military — even though they did in a greater per capita number than other groups — he later retracted that statement. This new biography by Chernow (whose earlier tome on Alexander Hamilton directly inspired the stage musical) comes in at exactly 1,200 pages, covering Twain’s birth shortly after Halley’s Comet appeared in 1835 to the death that came soon after its next appearance 74 years later — as the increasingly eccentric writer predicted. Marc Weisblott

Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer by David Denby

(Henry Holt)

April 8, 2025

WRITING ABOUT reading has long been a passion for this former New Yorker film critic, reflected in his 1996 bestseller Great Books, which chronicled his middle-aged engagement with the Western canon through courses at Columbia University. Subsequently, he got attention for American Sucker — a memoir about losing big on the stock market — and a polemic about the prevalence of Snark. Now that he’s into his eighties, a lifetime of thoughts on the impact of Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer are synthesized into a volume about how music, film, feminism, and literature were influenced by a common heritage. Marc Weisblott

My Legs Were Praying: A Bibliography of Abraham Joseph Heschel by Or N. Rose with Rabbi Dov Peretz Elkins

(Monkfish Publishing)

May 16, 2025

ON THE HEELS of the sixtieth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr. leading 8,000 protesters on a march from Selma to Montgomery comes a short book about the kippah-clad rabbi who joined on the front lines. Born in Warsaw in 1907, Heschel settled in Cincinnati in 1940 to helm the Hebrew Union College of Reform Judaism, then moved to New York for a posting with the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary. Susannah Heschel, who followed in his scholarly footsteps — and introduced the idea of adding an orange to the Passover seder plate, as a symbol of inclusion — endorsed this book by writing the foreword. Marc Weisblott

Misphonia by Dana Vowinckel

(HarperVia)

May 6, 2025

DANA VOWINCKEL’S DEBUT NOVEL, The World in a Ziplock Bag, is told from the perspective of a 15-year-old Jewish girl named Margarita, whose life careens from Jerusalem to Berlin to Chicago —much like the author’s. After she won a major German literary prize for that book, publishers decided to make the story more available to international audiences. Margarita’s father works as a synagogue cantor in Germany while her mother long ago departed for Israel; amidst the domestic chaos, she’s sent to live with her grandparents in America. Marc Weisblott

Sapiens: A Graphic History, Volume 3: The Masters of History by Yuval Noah Harari

(Signal)

May 27, 2025

THE THICK BOOKS by Israel’s most globally popular public intellectual, like last year’s Nexus, lead a lot of readers to wish for a more digestible approach, and he’s spent the past few years delivering it in an adaptation of his first major work. The third volume of his comic-book-style retelling of his blockbuster ponders whether humanity is united by empire, money, religion — or something else entirely. The characters who try to dominate society, Harari argues, often end up dividing it instead. (Middle-grade readers get their own parallel set of big-picture explorations, drawn out in another Harari series called Unstoppable Us.) Marc Weisblott

Talmud for Dummies by Arthur Kurzweil

(Wiley)

May 13, 2025

DOS FOR DUMMIES WAS PUBLISHED in November 1991 — and a publishing juggernaut was born: it has spawned over 1,600 titles. It took a decade for Judaism to get its own volume, written by Rabbi Ted Falcon of the Reform Movement along with technology writer David Blatner. Kabbalah for Dummies got its turn in 2006, and Torah for Dummies surfaced in 2008, under the supervision Kurzweil, who ran the pre-internet Jewish Book Club — and now he’s returned to distill 2,771 imposing pages spread over 63 hulking volumes into a basic navigational guidebook. It may even stay in print longer than new titles like Bluesky for Dummies or Polyamory for Dummies. Marc Weisblott

Honoria: A Fortuitous Friendship by Janice Shapiro

(Fantagraphics)

April 1, 2025

A CAREER that started with screenplays and short story writing pivoted to personal comic-strip confessions with Shapiro’s series called Crushable: My Life in Crushes from Ricky Nelson to Viggo Mortensen. (Other subjects of affectionate celebrity worship: Neil Young and Mary Tyler Moore.) Her debut graphic novel focuses on real-life socialite Honoria Murphy Donnelly, who died in 1998 at age 81. In this treatment, the daughter of the couple from modernist Europe is paired for a summer with the daughter of American family friends, and the two try and figure out their place amidst the swirling social scenes along the French Riviera of 1929. Marc Weisblott

Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life by Dan Nadel

(Scribner)

April 15, 2025

ROBERT CRUMB began his six-decade-long career by illustrating greeting cards and proceeded to raunchy characters like Mr. Natural and Fritz the Cat — and, among his later works, an illustrated version of The Book of Genesis (although its explicit portrayals of the likes of Adam and Eve weren’t necessarily as subversive as most anticipated). The underground comics pioneer eventually settled down in the south of France with his wife and collaborator Aline Kominsky-Crumb. This is the stuff that big biographies are made of. Marc Weisblott

Autocorrect: Stories by Etgar Keret (translated by Jessica Cohen and Sondra Silverston)

(Riverhead Books)

May 27, 2025

WORKING WITH RESEARCHERS at Tel Aviv University, the celebrated graphic novel writer turned short-story specialist spent much of the past year trying to figure out if artificial intelligence could write better fiction than people, only to come away feeling that his own students had more human talent than anything generated by machines. Throughout his seventh original bound collection, consisting of 33 separate pieces, humanity navigates technology — and the two tend not to get along. Marc Weisblott

Lake Burntshore by Aaron Kreuter

(ECW Press)

April 22, 2025

A COMING-OF-AGE novel about a Canadian camp counsellor who falls in love with one of the Israeli soldiers imported for the summer to deal with a staff shortfall — even though his role in the IDF is at odds with her own stance about Israel. It’s the follow-up to Rubble Children, a collection of short stories based on a fictional Reform synagogue in the Toronto suburb of Thornhill, where hormonal urges similarly collide with the struggles to navigate narratives about the Middle East. Marc Weisblott