{"id":196173,"date":"2026-06-28T07:13:28","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T15:13:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=196173"},"modified":"2026-06-28T08:37:17","modified_gmt":"2026-06-28T16:37:17","slug":"grace-paley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=196173","title":{"rendered":"Grace Paley"},"content":{"rendered":"

Grace Paley<\/a> (1922-2007) reshaped the American short story by showing that ordinary talk could carry the heaviest emotional and moral freight. She published three collections of stories across more than four decades, and those three slim books changed what American fiction could do. Her prose catches the rhythms of working-class New York, and above all its Jewish neighborhoods, through dialogue that sounds spontaneous while answering to a poet’s discipline. She also built a second career as poet, essayist, teacher, and political activist, and she held that literature and civic duty fed one another rather than competing for a writer’s attention.<\/p>\n

She was born Grace Goodside on December 11, 1922, in New York City. Her parents, Isaac and Mania Goodside, were Jewish physicians and socialist revolutionaries who fled Tsarist Russia after political persecution. Their home joined intellectual seriousness to political idealism. Russian governed much of her childhood at home, while English belonged to the streets of the Bronx. She came of age during the Depression among immigrants from many backgrounds, and she developed there the ear for overlapping voices that became the defining feature of her fiction.<\/p>\n

She attended Hunter College<\/a> and later the New School for Social Research<\/a>, where she studied poetry with W. H. Auden<\/a> (1907-1973) in the early 1940s. Auden pressed discipline, rhythm, and compression on his students, and those lessons stay visible across Paley’s career. Even when her prose reads as conversational or improvised, its cadences carry the training of a poet. She enrolled for a time at New York University<\/a> and left without a degree, finding observation and lived experience worth more to her than the classroom.<\/p>\n

Her literary debut came late. After years given largely to family, she published The Little Disturbances of Man<\/em> in 1959. Critics recognized the originality of her voice at once. Rather than lean on elaborate plot, Paley built stories from conversation, fragments of memory, neighborhood encounters, and moments of quiet revelation. Her characters interrupt one another, contradict themselves, drop one subject for another, and let deep truths slip out in passing. Under the surface ease lies hard technical control.<\/p>\n

In 1942 she married the filmmaker Jess Paley. The couple had two children and divorced in the early 1970s. Motherhood sat at the center of both her life and her fiction. She refused to treat domestic duty as an obstacle to serious writing. Family life, neighborhood friendship, and political work became connected parts of one life, and she wrote many of her earliest stories at the kitchen table while she raised her children.<\/p>\n

Many of her finest stories turn on Faith Darwin, a recurring figure who serves as a fictional counterpart without sliding into a simple autobiographical stand-in. Across many stories Faith grows older, raises children, passes through divorce, joins political protests, and faces illness and death. Paley never wrote a conventional novel. She assembled instead an evolving mosaic whose cumulative effect produces a rich portrait of postwar urban America.<\/p>\n

Her second collection, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute<\/em> (1974), set her among the leading short-story writers in the country. Stories such as “Faith in a Tree,” “Living,” and “Wants” take up marriage, divorce, motherhood, aging, and friendship while they hold questions of war, inequality, and civic duty in view. Her final collection, Later the Same Day<\/em> (1985), pressed these concerns further. It carried a stronger sense of mortality and kept the wit and generosity that mark her work.<\/p>\n

Paley remained a poet across her life. The collections Leaning Forward<\/em> (1985), New and Collected Poems<\/em> (1992), Begin Again: Collected Poems<\/em> (2000), and the posthumous Fidelity<\/em> (2008) show the same compressed language, moral seriousness, and attention to ordinary speech that distinguish her stories. Her mixed collection Long Walks and Intimate Talks<\/em> (1991) moves between prose and poetry, and it shows how the two forms answered each other in her imagination. Where her fiction lodges politics inside everyday talk, her poetry addresses war, aging, justice, and moral duty head on. The later anthology The Grace Paley Reader<\/em> (2017) gathers stories, essays, poems, and interviews, and it shows the unity of her literary vision.<\/p>\n

Dialogue defines Paley’s prose. Many writers use conversation to move a plot forward. Paley makes speech the subject. Her narrators step back and let characters reveal themselves through interruption, misunderstanding, gossip, jokes, and unfinished thought. The prose reads as effortless and reaches a high emotional density. Her style draws on Yiddish storytelling, on modernist experiment, and on American vernacular speech.<\/p>\n

She refused sentimental pictures of domestic life. Marriage in her fiction often wobbles. Parenthood mixes affection with exhaustion. Friendships among women often outlast romance, and women sustain one another through conversation, practical help, childcare, and shared experience rather than grand declaration. Long before talk of work and family balance grew common, Paley drew women who improvise across family duty, creative ambition, and political commitment.<\/p>\n

Jewish identity informs nearly all of her fiction. She turns from theology and ritual toward Judaism as an inherited moral culture carried in humor, argument, memory, family obligation, and neighborhood life. Her characters argue about almost everything, and that argument reflects both democratic politics and the Jewish intellectual tradition. Immigration stays present in the background even where she leaves it unspoken.<\/p>\n

Political activism took up as much of her life as writing. From the 1960s she gave herself to opposition to the Vietnam War<\/a>. She refused to pay war taxes, joined civil disobedience, traveled on peace delegations, and accepted repeated arrests as the cost of democratic citizenship. She later campaigned for nuclear disarmament, women’s rights, environmental protection, and social justice. In 1978 the authorities arrested her after an anti-nuclear protest on the White House grounds, and she treated the arrest as an ordinary civic duty rather than a personal sacrifice.<\/p>\n

Her activism carried the same democratic values that shaped her teaching. Alongside appointments at Sarah Lawrence College<\/a> and City College of New York<\/a>, she led writing workshops in community centers, public schools, and prisons. She held that storytelling belongs to everyone and not to a literary elite. Students recalled that she pressed listening before writing and insisted that honest fiction starts with close attention to the way men and women speak.<\/p>\n

After her divorce from Jess Paley, she married the poet and playwright Robert Nichols (1919-2010) in 1972. Nichols shared her artistic interests and her political commitments. The couple took part in peace work and traveled abroad for human rights causes. In her later decades they lived in Thetford, Vermont<\/a>, and the quieter country landscape entered her late poems and stories without loosening her hold on national and international politics.<\/p>\n

Her nonfiction appears most fully in Just As I Thought<\/em> (1998), a volume of essays, lectures, interviews, and political reflection. Across these writings she argues that literature and citizenship cannot come apart. Writing, for Paley, asked for sustained attention to voices that power tends to ignore.<\/p>\n

Her complete fiction appears in The Collected Stories<\/em> (1994), a single volume that became a finalist for the National Book Award<\/a>. The collection shows how her three slim books form one continuous portrait of postwar New York and trace decades of social change through recurring families, neighbors, and friendships.<\/p>\n

Paley took many honors in her lifetime, among them the Rea Award for the Short Story<\/a> and a National Book Award citation in 1997. She served as the first official New York State Author from 1986 to 1988. After her death the filmmaker Lilly Rivlin directed the documentary Grace Paley: Collected Shorts<\/em>, which carried her writing and her activism to new audiences. Her name continues through the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, awarded each year to an emerging writer.<\/p>\n

Critics have set Paley beside Anton Chekhov<\/a> (1860-1904) for her compassion, James Joyce<\/a> (1882-1941) for his rendering of city life, and Bernard Malamud<\/a> (1914-1986) and Philip Roth<\/a> (1933-2018) for her place in Jewish American letters. Her achievement stands apart. She showed that a writer could build a major reputation without large novels and rely instead on brief stories that gather into an expansive social history.<\/p>\n

Her influence reaches well past the small number of stories she published. Lorrie Moore<\/a> (b. 1957), Amy Hempel<\/a> (b. 1951), George Saunders<\/a> (b. 1958), Jhumpa Lahiri<\/a> (b. 1967), and Deborah Eisenberg<\/a> (b. 1945) drew on her proof that compression, voice, and ordinary speech can reach a deep emotional complexity. Her poetry shaped writers drawn to the meeting of the personal and the political. More broadly, she widened the range of feminist fiction by letting women speak on the page with the interruptions, contradictions, humor, anger, and resilience of real life.<\/p>\n

Grace Paley died on August 22, 2007, at her home in Thetford after a long illness with breast cancer. Her body of work stays compact, and few twentieth-century American writers reach such influence with so little published fiction. She showed that the deepest drama unfolds not only in historical crisis but in conversation between neighbors, between parents and children, between old friends, and between strangers who try to understand one another. Her writing lasts because it treats those everyday exchanges as the true substance of democratic life.<\/p>\n

‘A Big Misunderstanding’<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

David Pinsof argues that intellectuals blame the world’s troubles on misunderstanding because the story flatters them. If ignorance and bias cause our problems, then the people whose trade is correcting ignorance and bias become the saviors of mankind. Pinsof rejects the premise. Humans are savvy animals who understand what they have an incentive to understand. Stupidity is strategic. Our problems come from bad motives, not bad beliefs. The work of the analyst, on this view, is to stop confusing stated motives with actual ones, mission statements with goals, the words a man says about himself with the deeds that feed him.<\/p>\n

Grace Paley built a life and a body of work on the opposite premise. She held that literature and citizenship feed one another, that fiction starts with listening, that storytelling belongs to everyone and not to a literary elite. She treated attention to ignored voices as a moral act and arrest at an anti-war protest as ordinary civic duty. <\/p>\n

Start with the credo. Honest fiction begins with attention to the way men and women speak. Listen first, then write. Power ignores certain voices, and the writer who hears them restores them. This is a theory of repair through understanding. The world goes wrong because some voices go unheard, and the writer who hears them does redemptive work. Pinsof’s reply runs straight at it. This is the writer’s mission statement, and a mission statement makes the writer the hero of the story. Starbucks nurtures the human spirit one cup at a time and also maximizes profit. Paley restores ignored voices and also climbs.<\/p>\n

Climbs toward what. The literary field rewards distinction, and Paley found a fresh source of it. She took the gossip and interruption of working-class Jewish women in the Bronx and made canonical art of it. The move reads as humility, the elevation of the low, and it functions as a claim of discovery. She heard what others had walked past. The reward followed the claim. A National Book Award finalist, the first New York State Author, a short-fiction prize that carries her name. The democratic aesthetic doubles as a ladder, and the writer who insists that storytelling belongs to everyone collects the credit for saying so. Pinsof would note that the insistence costs her nothing and earns her the canon.<\/p>\n

Consider the slim output. Three collections across more than four decades. Her admirers turn the scarcity into a virtue and repeat the line that few writers reach such influence with so little. Pinsof’s endowment effect applies to reputations as well as to objects. The scarcity becomes an asset. A writer who published twelve fat novels would have to defend twelve fat novels. Paley defends three slim books, and the slimness itself signals that every sentence earned its place. The legend of doing more with less is a status holding, and her readers manage it for her.<\/p>\n

Then the activism. Vietnam, war-tax resistance, nuclear disarmament, women’s rights, peace delegations, repeated arrests. The frame asks what coalition rewarded these acts, and the answer is the postwar literary Left that staffed Sarah Lawrence, City College, the little magazines, and the peace committees. Paley did not defy that milieu. She paid its membership dues. Arrest on the White House grounds reads as cost only to an outsider. Inside her coalition it reads as a credential, and the credential converts to standing among the people whose esteem she needed. She fought in the direction her incentives pointed.<\/p>\n

The disavowal seals it. Paley called the 1978 arrest an ordinary civic obligation rather than a personal sacrifice. Pinsof has a name for this. Denial and embellishment are weapons. The savvy player downplays his own cost, because the man who refuses the medal looks worthier than the man who pins it on. Modesty about sacrifice raises the honest-signal value of the sacrifice. She declined the credit in the one manner that secures it.<\/p>\n

Her socialism descends from revolutionary parents, and her enemies were capital and the war state. Pinsof predicts something sharper than stated enemies. Antiracist elites resent millionaires and billionaires because the rich are their nearest rivals in the hierarchy, not their farthest. The literary Left runs hot toward adjacent targets, the sell-out, the careerist, the insufficiently committed peer, more than toward the distant tycoon it never meets. The record on Paley here stays thin, and I will not manufacture a quarrel she did not have. The frame flags the prediction and leaves the evidence where it is.<\/p>\n

Her feminist fiction draws the same reading. She let women speak with their contradictions and their anger, and she refused the sentimental picture of domestic life. The refusal of sentimentality is a distinction move against rival women’s writing, a way of marking her work as the unsentimental and therefore serious kind. The theme of female friendship outlasting romance bonds the in-group. Pinsof reads the alliance under the art. The art builds a coalition and derogates a softer rival school in the same stroke.<\/p>\n

And the reputation for compassion. Critics set her beside Chekhov for tenderness. She spoke of universal love, the human spirit, peace. Pinsof’s account of cynicism explains the payoff. Cynics read as meanies, so we spout idealism to signal we are sweeties, and it works. Paley spoke warmth and the field returned warmth to her. The signal cleared.<\/p>\n

Paley the artist rendered savvy, self-deceiving, status-jockeying social animals with great accuracy. Her characters gossip, deny, embellish, argue to position themselves, and disclose their real aims by accident. The dialogue knows what the essays deny. On the page she draws men and women who understand their incentives all too well. In the lectures she preaches consciousness-raising and the rescue of the misinformed. The novelist saw clearly. The activist looked away. Pinsof would say the activist had incentives the novelist could suspend, because fiction pays for clear sight and politics pays for the flattering story.<\/p>\n

Paley understood her incentives and served them, and her admirers manage her legend because it serves theirs, and Pinsof builds his audience by saying so, and I add value to this small conversation by saying it after him. The only misunderstanding is that Paley misunderstood anything. She listened, she climbed, and the two were the same act.<\/p>\n

The Chorus Against the Silence: A Hero System for Grace Paley<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The kitchen table comes first. Before the three slim books, before the arrests, before the prize that carries her name, a woman sits at a table in the Bronx with two children pulling at her sleeve and a pot going cold on the stove, and she listens. Grace Paley writes there, between the demands, on the backs of envelopes and in the margins of the afternoon. The talk in the room moves fast. A neighbor leans in the doorway with a complaint about her husband. A child interrupts to report an injustice. Nobody finishes a sentence. The radio carries news of a war somewhere. Paley, who studied compression with a poet, hears in the half-talk the thing she spends forty years saving.<\/p>\n

What she saves it from is the terror under the table.<\/p>\n

Ernest Becker<\/a> (1924-1974) gave us the frame in The Denial of Death<\/em><\/a>. A man lives under two terrors. The first is annihilation, the plain fact that he dies. The second is insignificance, the suspicion that his life leaves no mark, that he passes and the world closes over him as water closes over a stone. Every culture hands its members a hero system, a scheme of action that promises a man he counts, that some part of him survives the grave inside a project larger than his body. The soldier earns it through valor. The merchant earns it through the fortune that bears his name. The father earns it through the son. The terror never leaves. The hero system holds it at arm’s length.<\/p>\n

Paley’s terror has a particular shape. She does not fear only her own death, though the breast cancer comes for her in the end. She fears the death of the voice. She fears the silence that swallows the woman at the kitchen table whose talk no one writes down, the immigrant mother whose argument with her daughter counts for nothing in the books of state, the neighbor whose gossip and grief and joke vanish the instant they leave her mouth. Power keeps a record of generals and presidents. The table keeps no record at all. The terror is erasure, and the people it erases are the people Paley loves.<\/p>\n

Her hero system answers the terror with a single move. She makes the record. Literature, for Paley, is the ledger that saves the ordinary life from the silence. Not the heroic life. The ordinary one. The half-finished sentence, the interruption, the joke that dies on the air becomes, on her page, the permanent thing. And because the talk in her stories never ends, because her characters break off and resume across three books and forty years, the conversation she builds outlasts any single speaker in it, including her. She beats death by refusing to be a soloist. She dissolves herself into a chorus, and the chorus does not die.<\/p>\n

This is her subtraction. To make the chorus carry her, she gives up the monument of the self. She refuses the novel, the great house of one consciousness. She publishes three thin collections, The Little Disturbances of Man, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, and Later the Same Day, and lets the slimness stand. She refuses the pose of the solitary genius and teaches in prisons and public schools, handing the trade to anyone who will listen. She refuses theology, takes Judaism as a moral inheritance carried in argument and memory rather than a promise of heaven, and so denies herself the oldest consolation of all. She removes every prop that lets a writer feel like a hero alone. What remains is the gamble that the chorus will hold her up after she lets go. The gamble pays. Lorrie Moore and George Saunders and the others carry the line forward, and the prize keeps her name in circulation, and the talk continues.<\/p>\n

Now the harder question. Paley’s life turns on a few sacred words. Voice. Witness. Peace. Fidelity. These words feel universal. They are not. Each one means what it means only inside her hero system, and a man in another hero system hears the same word and reaches for something else. Walk the words through their rooms.<\/p>\n

Start with voice.<\/p>\n

In a stone abbey before dawn, a Trappist novice wants to speak and a bell forbids it. The abbot has told him that speech is the thing they offer up, that a man comes closer to God by withholding the noise of himself. Here voice is what you surrender. Significance arrives through silence, and the self counts by going quiet before a presence that fills the room when the talking stops.<\/p>\n

In a glass conference room on the fortieth floor, a senior partner runs a young litigator through a mock cross. “Drop your voice at the end of the question,” he says. “You lose the jury when you plead.” Here voice is a weapon. It wins the verdict, and the verdict is the only thing that survives the trial. Significance arrives through victory, and the self counts by prevailing over another self in open combat.<\/p>\n

In a courtyard in Senegal a griot tunes a kora and begins to name the dead. He recites a lineage of kings going back twelve generations, and the names are accurate, and the village leans in. Here voice is a vessel. It carries the ancestors forward, and the griot’s own throat matters only as the channel through which the dead keep speaking. Significance arrives through memory, and the self counts by becoming the instrument of a line older than itself.<\/p>\n

Paley’s voice is none of these. It is not surrendered, not weaponized, not ancestral. It is the ordinary speaking self, the woman at the table, restored against the power that would let her vanish. When Paley says voice she means the thing the monk gives away, the thing the lawyer aims, the thing the griot lends to the dead, and she means it as none of them mean it. The word is the same. The hero systems do not touch.<\/p>\n

Take witness.<\/p>\n

A man sits all night in a cold room beside a body, a shomer guarding the dead until the burial, reading psalms aloud so the deceased is not alone. For him witness is company. The dead must not lie unattended, and the living man’s task is presence, not record. He writes nothing down. He stays.<\/p>\n

A photographer crouches in a doorway in a burning city and frames a wounded child against the smoke. For him witness is indictment. The image goes out so the world cannot later claim it did not know. The point of his presence is the document that accuses.<\/p>\n

Paley witnesses in a third way. She attends to the ignored and writes them into the permanent text so the silence does not get them. Company, indictment, record. Three men use one word and stand in three different relations to the same dead.<\/p>\n

Take peace.<\/p>\n

A Roman general surveys a valley the morning after the legion has finished its work. The smoke rises straight in the still air and no dog barks. He calls this peace, and he is not wrong by his lights. Pax is the quiet that follows total force, and significance for him arrives through the conquest that produces the quiet.<\/p>\n

A city patrolman walks a corner at midnight, nightstick loose in his hand, radio low. Peace for him is order held in place by the credible threat behind his belt. Significance arrives through control, and the self counts by keeping the lid on.<\/p>\n

A Carthusian hermit kneels alone in a cell he will not leave. Peace for him is the stilled mind, want extinguished, the interior noise gone quiet. Significance arrives through cessation, and the self counts by emptying out.<\/p>\n

Paley spends her peace on none of these. She refuses war taxes, joins the disarmament marches, lets the police arrest her on the White House grounds in 1978, and calls the arrest an ordinary civic duty rather than a sacrifice. Her peace is the absence of the war state’s violence, won by bodies placed in its path. The general’s peace is the war state perfected. The same word names a thing and its opposite, and each speaker feels the cosmos behind him.<\/p>\n

Take fidelity, which she set as the title of her last poems.<\/p>\n

A vassal kneels and puts his hands between the hands of his lord and swears to keep faith unto death. Fidelity for him is loyalty up the chain of rank, and a man who breaks it forfeits his name and his place in the order of things. Significance arrives through the bond freely given and never withdrawn.<\/p>\n

A widow keeps the bed she shared for fifty years and speaks to a husband three years in the ground. Fidelity for her is the vow outliving the man, a loyalty that has no living object and asks for none. Significance arrives through constancy that death cannot cancel.<\/p>\n

Paley’s fidelity runs sideways rather than up or back. She stays true to the ordinary voice, to the friend across the decades, to the cause that wins nothing, to the unspectacular thing pursued for forty years without a monument at the end. The vassal binds upward. The widow binds backward. Paley binds across, to the chorus and the table, and her constancy is the long refusal to trade the small true thing for the large false one.<\/p>\n

So the words do not travel. Voice, witness, peace, fidelity sound like the common property of mankind, and they belong instead to the rooms that give them sense. This is what Becker saw and what Paley shows without saying. A sacred value is the local currency of a hero system. Carry it across the border and it buys nothing.<\/p>\n

Three coordinates locate her, and they are best left in plain sentences.<\/p>\n

She places her immortality in the continuing talk. Not in heaven, which she set aside, and not in the single great book, which she refused to write, but in the chorus of ordinary voices that breaks off in one story and resumes in the next and goes on after the author is gone. Where another writer builds a tomb, Paley joins a conversation and trusts it to keep talking. That trust is her answer to the terror, and the line of writers who carry her forward shows the answer held.<\/p>\n

She pays for it with the self as monument. She surrenders the novel, the genius pose, the theology, every device by which a writer feels heroic alone, and she gambles that the chorus will hold her weight once she lets go of the props. A man in another hero system reads the surrender as humility. Becker reads it as strategy. Both are right. Humility is the form her denial of death takes, and the form is real, and so is the denial under it.<\/p>\n

And the limit. Each room in this essay regards the others as confused. The general thinks Paley naive about force. Paley thinks the general a servant of erasure. The monk thinks both of them loud. None of them misunderstands. Each understands the cost of his own scheme and the comfort it buys, and each calls the comfort by a sacred name. Paley’s chorus is her shelter against annihilation, dressed in the clothing of attention to the poor, and the dressing does not make the shelter less true or less needed. She built a good one. She knew what she was building. The talk goes on, and she is somewhere inside it, which is the only kind of forever her hero system ever promised.<\/p>\n

Related Links:<\/p>\n

Pearl Abraham<\/a> Elisa Albert<\/a> Steve Almond<\/a> Jonathan Ames<\/a> Shalom Auslander<\/a> Aimee Bender<\/a> Karen Bender<\/a> Amy Bloom<\/a> Danit Brown<\/a> Melvin Jules Bukiet<\/a> Tamar Fox<\/a> Naama Goldstein<\/a> Rebecca Goldstein<\/a> Yael Goldstein<\/a> Laurie Graff<\/a> Lauren Grodstein<\/a> Ehud Havazelet<\/a> Joanna Hershon<\/a> Dara Horn<\/a> Molly Jong-Fast<\/a> Mitchell James Kaplan<\/a> Binnie Kirshenbaum<\/a> Sana Krasikov<\/a> Adam Mansbach<\/a> Tova Mirvis<\/a> Gurumurthy Neelakantan<\/a> Alana Newhouse<\/a> Jon Papernick<\/a> Rachel Resnick<\/a> Thane Rosenbaum<\/a> Elizabeth Rosner<\/a> Wendy Shalit<\/a> Ilana Stanger-Ross<\/a> Laurie Gwen Shapiro<\/a> Rochelle Shapiro<\/a> Andrea Seigel<\/a> Robert Siegel<\/a> Terrie Silverman<\/a> Margot Singer<\/a> Leora Skolkin-Smith<\/a> Yuri Slezkine<\/a> Diana Spechler<\/a> Steve Stern<\/a> Ayelet Waldman<\/a> Katharine Weber<\/a> Tamar Yellin<\/a> People of the Book Festival 2006<\/a><\/p>\n

Yosef Abramowitz<\/a> Edward Alexander<\/a> Michael Berenbaum<\/a> Sally Berkovic<\/a> James Besser<\/a> Reuven Blau<\/a> Stephen Bloom<\/a> Andrew Silow-Carroll<\/a> Shmuley Boteach<\/a> Benyamin Cohen<\/a> Debra Nussbaum Cohen<\/a> Robert Cohn<\/a> Ami Eden<\/a> Rob Eshman<\/a> Larry Cohler-Esses<\/a> Frances Dinkelspiel<\/a> Matt Dorf<\/a> Ami Eden<\/a> Charles Fenyvesi<\/a> Eric Fingerhut<\/a> Amnon Finkelstein<\/a> Sue Fishkoff<\/a> Samuel Freedman<\/a> Stephen Fried<\/a> Robert I. Friedman<\/a> Heshy Fried<\/a> Jonathan Friendly<\/a> Neal Gabler<\/a> Evan Gahr<\/a> J.J. Goldberg<\/a> Ari Goldman<\/a> Yossi Klein Halevi<\/a> Malcolm Hoenlein<\/a> Wayne Hoffman<\/a> Hollywood Jews<\/a> Mickey Kaus<\/a> Eve Kessler<\/a> Michael Kinsley<\/a> Amy Klein<\/a> Marc S. Klein<\/a> Lisa S. Lenkiewicz<\/a> Gene Lichtenstein<\/a> Jason Maoz<\/a> Jonathan Mark<\/a> Deborah Dash Moore<\/a> Alana Newhouse<\/a> Gustav Niebuhr<\/a> Ori Nir<\/a> Steve Rabinowitz<\/a> Gary Rosenblatt<\/a> Jennie Rothenberg<\/a> Debra Rubin<\/a> Neil Rubin<\/a> Walter Ruby<\/a> Douglas Rushkoff<\/a> Jonathan Sarna<\/a> Cathy Seipp<\/a> Rabbi Avi Shafran<\/a> Mark Silk<\/a> Sheldon Teitelbaum<\/a> Jonathan Tobin<\/a> Tom Tugend<\/a> David Twersky<\/a> Teresa Watanabe<\/a> Steven I. Weiss<\/a> Leon Wieseltier<\/a> Paul Wilkes<\/a> Lauren Winner<\/a> Yori Yanover<\/a> Larry Yudelson<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Grace Paley (1922-2007) reshaped the American short story by showing that ordinary talk could carry the heaviest emotional and moral freight. She published three collections of stories across more than four decades, and those three slim books changed what American … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t