Isaac Butler

The first synagogue in America was built by enslaved people.

So it's both a history of Jews in the United States and a history of the institution of slavery and a history of how those things meld together all in one.

I sort of don't know how he did it because it moves very quickly and it's really beautifully told.

One that I've had really good luck with is this book that New York Review of Books editions put out, reissued, called The Kindness of Strangers by Salka Viertel.

And it's a memoir.

She's a Polish-Jewish stage actress who eventually makes her way to Vienna.

And she's a big actress in the Viennese stage.

And then she flees and comes to California along with, you know, many of the other Jewish intelligentsia.

where she becomes Greta Garbo's best friend and go-to screenwriter and maybe lover, although that's not discussed in the memoir.

She has this German-Jewish husband.

They have this very open, bohemian relationship.

And her house becomes the center of German intellectual exile life in Los Angeles.

So, you know, like Thomas Mann's birthday is at her house.

You know, all the people in the film industry are there.

And so she just led this really extraordinary life.

And the way she talks about it is really beautiful and fun.

Well, I should send you a photo of my nightstand because my New Year's resolution this year is to default to books that I owned prior to New Year's.

Because I have so many that I have accumulated over decades that I have not read.

And it's sort of like that scene in High Fidelity where he's reorganizing...

His records autobiographically, you know?