Jewish 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...
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