Time-honored Jewish stereotypes and caricatures are falling on hard times in the movies. Al Pacino’s complex and heart-wrenching portrayal of Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” put a human face on ...

Editor’s note: The opinions of the smart, well-read women in my Denver book club mean a lot, and often determine what the rest of us choose to pile onto our bedside tables. So we asked them, and all ...

NPR's Scott Simon speaks with novelist Allison Epstein about her new novel "Fagin the Thief," which imagines a backstory for the character from the Charles Dickens book "Oliver Twist." Sometimes, ...

No small part of the bouncy charm of “Oliver!” is that the snakes in the grass have all the lines. Having stolen everything else in sight, the well-known Anglo-Saxon villain, Fagin, and his pint-sized ...

Great expectations are unavoidable when Roman Polanski takes on a Charles Dickens classic. Alas, his version of “Oliver Twist” fails to live up to them. This French-British-Czech production is ...