A thoughtful plot from Korea
Parasite is a social satire written and directed by a man named Bong Joon-ho, and stars a brilliant cast of actors whose names you probably don’t recognize. They portray a wealthy family, the Parks,...
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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