Jewish and Puerto Rican, she’s writing a cli-fi novel
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Michelle Fernandez is the twentysomething daughter of a Puerto Rican mother and a Jewish father, and while in college in upstate New York she minored in Jewish...
View ArticleArtist Schnaiberg focuses art on climate change
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — For Lee Schnaiberg in Montreal, global warming is no laughing matter, although the Canadian artist has a good sense of humor and the odd Yiddish phrase to make a...
View ArticleSDJW thanks its March 2016 contributors
SAN DIEGO — San Diego Jewish World expresses its appreciation to the byliners and staff photographers whose works appeared in March 2016 editions. They included: David Amos Eitan Arom Judy Lash Balint...
View ArticleAre you a clifihead?
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — If you grew up in the 1970s (or later) and were a die-hard ”Grateful Dead” rock band fan, you probably remember how fans often called themselves “Deadheads” in the...
View ArticleIsraeli author imagines world 300 years from now
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Don’t tell me there’s no sci-fi in Israel because there is, and Moran Chaimovitz, a 30 year old writer in Tel Aviv, has just published a novel in English to prove it....
View ArticleDown Under author produces a cli-fi novel
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan –If there’s one continent on Earth where the twin impacts of global warming and climate change are very much on the minds of the people who live there, it’s Australia....
View ArticleIn time of future disaster, there still will be humor
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, TAIWAN –Aaron Thier is a 30-something writer born and bred in western Massachusetts, and his latest novel Mr. Eternity has just been published by Bloomsbury in New York. The...
View Article6- year- old offers ideas to save the planet
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — When Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood tweets, the world listens. And when the 76-year-old writer chanced upon a short YouTube video of a 6-year-old girl in...
View ArticleCli-fi, quidditch, latte art among new words
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — When the Oxford Dictionaries in Britain made a list of new words it was accepting into its chambers for 2017, J.K. Rowling’s ”Harry Potter” novels had its “quidditch...
View ArticleYiddish version of ‘O Canada’ set for debut
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Think about it. The Canadian national anthem “O Canada” has been sung in a variety of non-English iterations, from French to Spanish. One source in Canada cites a...
View ArticleChinese- language Jerusalem cookbook debuts
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan –When the Chinese-language edition of the popular Israeli cuisine cookbook “Jerusalem” was recently published in Taiwan, Israel’s trade envoy to the island nation...
View ArticleCanadian TV talk show talks up ‘cli-fi’
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — For a group of 17 short story writers in Canada, putting together a collection of stories for a new anthology titled Cli-Fi: Canadian Tales of Climate Change was a...
View ArticleThe odyssey of a climate activist
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — A few weeks ago, I approached Rabbi Michael Lerner in California, the founder of Tikkun magazine, about writing a blog post for his publication, and he kindly invited...
View ArticleO Canada in Yiddish to debut June 6
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Take two Canadian offspring of Holocaust survivors, Moses Znaimer and Hindy Nosek-Abelson, and put them in Toronto TV studio and the result will be the first-ever...
View ArticleJewish baseball card book now on sale
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — I first met Robert Wechsler online during some email chats back in 2015 when he was trying to find out the name of the artist who painted the portraits on the 1952...
View ArticleDedication to wife is one for the books
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — When a Methodist man and a Jewish woman, both writers, get together in longterm holy matrimony in Vermont, the result is not only a household full of books and...
View ArticleVeracity questioned of “The Tattooist of Auschwitz’
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — In a personal blog post I published in September I asked my readers if the current bestseller The Tattooist of Auschwitz, a Holocaust sex and romance “novel”...
View ArticleMore doubt cast on Auschwitz tattooist novel
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — A bestselling novel about the Holocaust has generated a strong backlash from readers around the world, and most importantly, from the Auschwitz Museum in Poland,...
View ArticleDebate intensifies over ‘Tattooist of Auschwitz’ novel
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — As readers around the world are finding out now, the Holocaust sex-and-romance novel by the non-Jewish Australian screenwriter Heather Morris titled The Tattooist of...
View ArticleWeighing the ‘Tattooist’ controversy
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Do novels about the Holocaust have to be vetted before publication? It’s a good question and one that literary critics and Holocaust historians and educators have...
View ArticleZi-Fi? It’s science fiction from Israel
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Israel is the quintessential science fiction nation, according to Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem, co-editors of of an anthology of 17 short stories in a new...
View Article‘Tattooist’ author defends her turf
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — “[The Jews] feel protective and [feel they have] a degree of [ownership] over the Holocaust story. I totally ‘get’ that, but maybe there’s room for both of us?”...
View ArticleA Jewish climate activist of the literary kind
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan – When people ask me what I do in retirement I like to say I’m a “Jewish climate activist of the literary kind.” Here’s why: I’m Jewish. I’m 70. I’m not a novelist,...
View ArticleWaiting for another ‘On the Beach’
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — I sometimes call myself a Jewish-American climate activist of the literary kind based in Taiwan, but I am not a novelist or a literary critic. Instead, as a...
View ArticleMan who coined ‘cli-fi’ exults over Jeopardy
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Hollywood is catching up with my ”cli-fi” buzzword these days, if the popular TV show “Jeopardy” is any indication. Let me explain: On my cable TV set in Taiwan,...
View ArticleDo we have 30 generations to go?
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Jewish futurists don’t usually fall for end of the world predictions or alien abductions and UFO conspiracy theories. We steer clear of such pronouncements because...
View ArticleTackling climate change with a comic zest for life
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Getting a PhD in physics from Oxford University wasn’t enough for a British YouTuber known as @ClimateAdam. Worried about the future impacts of runaway global...
View ArticleCapitalize ‘Earth’ in climate change news articles
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — As a Jewish literary activist concerned about how things look on the printed page, I have been lobbying editors at major English-language newspapers and magazines for...
View ArticleWhat did you call your grandma and grandpa?
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — When Avrome David Goldberg of Little Rock, Arkansas died at the age of 93 in 2018, his local obituary noted that “Dave” — as he was called by everyone who knew him —...
View Article‘Cli-fi’ appears on ‘Jeopardy’ and in crossword puzzle
Editor’s Note: Ever since he coined the term “cli-fi,” SDJW correspondent Dan Bloom has monitored with satisfaction from his home in Chiayi City, Taiwan, the use of the term spreading in popular...
View ArticleHate to rain on Greta’s parade, but I coined ‘cli-fi’
By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — There are some novels and movies now that tell human stories about what climate change is like (or might be like) in the distant future. The genre is not sci-fi, but...
View ArticleRemembering his hometown from across the world
I grew up along the banks of the Connecticut River in western Massachusetts in the 1950s and 60s and that has made all the difference. The four seasons, the local public libraries, the excellent public...
View ArticleAuthor Lindsay Lerman is not from nowhere
Lindsay Lerman, the author of a new novel titled I'm From Nowhere, was born in the Chicago area and attended Northern Arizona University for her undergraduate studies and later received a PhD in...
View ArticleA lamed vavnik cli-fi mystery
There's a Jewish private eye trying to unravel a strange case that he is assigned to: a series of murders where the victims are found choked to death and with the letters ”LV” stamped into the flesh,...
View ArticleActivist pushes Hollywood to adopt cli-fi genre
Undeterred and full of confidence, I’ve launched the first-ever ''cli-fi movies initiative'' to try to get the “cli-fi” term into the ears, eyes and minds of major Hollywood players in the 2020s. My...
View ArticleClimate activist warns deniers financing movies
"All is not well on the cli-fi front," Diamond said. "The Kingsman movie franchise appears to be a repository for conservative politics. When I saw the movie I could not believe they were able to...
View ArticleWeather forecaster publishes cli-fi novel
For Glenn Schwartz in Philadelphia, writing a cli-fi novel about the weather came easy. He's a certified broadcast meteorologist who has done the weather on TV for 40 years of his 47-year career. His...
View ArticleFictional weather-maker faces religious controversy
"The story goes like this," Schwartz told me in a recent update to his earlier emails. "The main character, Neil Stephenson, is a TV meteorologist and a rising star in the Baltimore area. During a...
View Article‘Lost Book of Adana Moreau’ a Jewish story
“To answer your email, yes, my new novel does deal directly with the Jewish experience pre- and post-Russian Revolution, in Chicago during the Great Depression, and through the lens of an...
View ArticleJewish emigre from Nazi Germany was MLK’s tutor
Just the other day, I received an email from Jean Klugman in Boston that read: ''Hello Dan. My cousin Heather Siegel just sent me a copy of the article you wrote nine years ago, in 2011, in the San...
View ArticleHow to talk to your children about climate change
There's so much dreary and depressing news in the papers and on TV these days about the so-called ''climate emergency'' and the ''climate crisis.'' Article after article, op-ed after op-ed, it's a...
View Article‘Hurricane’ Schwartz dishes on debut novel
''If you’ve lived in the Philadelphia area and have watched NBC10 on TV in the last 25 years, you’ve seen most likely Glenn “Hurricane” Schwartz sweeping his arm over satellite images and telling you...
View ArticleCli-fi author helped Jewish neighbors on Shabbat
The more I work at this column-writing gig, the more I realize how true the motto of this website is that that "there's a Jewish story everywhere." Case in point: I was writing a draft about a...
View ArticleWe have cli-fi fiction; is corona-fi the next genre?
Well, first we had climate change angst, with dozens of cli-fi novels and movies about runaway global warming and all the nightmares that issue evokes. Now, cli-fi, of course, is on the back burner,...
View ArticleJewish storyteller behind ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’
There's a bright spot for children (and their adults) amidst all the sad news worldwide now about the COVID-19 pandemic. A cute children's picture book written 30 years ago by a British storyteller and...
View Article1997 novel about 2020 predicted a lethal pandemic
Neta Halperin, a literary critic in the leftwing Israeli newspaper Haaretz, leads off with a headline: ''The Coronavirus Novel: An Israeli Author Wrote a Book on the 2020 Pandemic 23 Years Ago"...
View ArticleA Toronto bagel bakery backstory
I recently received an email from a Canadian novelist named Roberta Park in Toronto, author of a new cli-fi novella titled The Disappearing Shore. "We are at an extraordinary point in human history,...
View ArticleRedeeming a Holocaust Survivor’s reputation
Retired California theater producer and drama professor George Kovach is the stepson the late Cecelia ''Cilka'' Klein who was the subject of a recent Holocaust sex and romance novel by an Australian...
View Article‘The Sacrifice Zone’ and worst cases of pollution
A ‘sacrifice zone,’ American novelist Roger S. Gottlieb tells us, is “a place so polluted it can never be cleaned up.” It is also the title of a highly original, deeply moving new novel from Gottlieb...
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