Located so deep in the Polish forests that its Jews were spared the Holocaust, the town of Kreskol somehow survived to the present day completely cut off from the outside world. Such is the fanciful premise of Max Gross’s The Lost Shtetl, whose plot is driven by the sudden end of these Jews’ isolation. Michal Leibowitz writes in her review:

During the recent round of fighting between Israel and Hamas, a few left-wing members of Congress not only condemned the Jewish state, but repeated libelous claims about “attacks” on al-Aqsa mosque. Worse still, their rhetoric seemed to imply, in classic anti-Semitic fashion, that Israel is not just a particularly problematic country, but one somehow at the root of all the world’s other problems. Seth Mandel writes: