In his career as a novelist, short-fiction writer, and essayist, Dan Jacobson once remarked, he had gone around the course twice. At this point in his prolific career it would be more exact to say that he has circled the course three times. In the...

Writer, critic, and teacher Dan Jacobson's writing seems haunted, both by his South African origins and by his Jewish heritage. A pioneer in South African fiction, he has written strikingly about his homeland and has received acclaim for his literary...

Born in South Africa in 1929, Dan Jacobson writes strikingly about his homeland. A pioneer in South African fiction, he has won praise for his work on this and other subjects from critics and a certain amount of popularity with the public in both...

Milton Jacobson (2 photos)PAID OBITUARIES Milton Jacobson, 87, of 2101 Wabank Road, Millersville, formerly of 1013 Janet Avenue, Lancaster, died in his sleep Friday at 3 a.m. in Lancaster General Hospital. He was the husband of the late Elinor Schwartz Jacobson, who died May...

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On the face of it, it's what the Jewish state has been yearning for ever since its founding nearly 60 years ago: full acceptance by its Arab neighbors.So why has Israel been so measured in its response to an Arab initiative offering just that in...

But you'd be wrong. Here are a couple of (trimmed!) excerpts from an email Dan Gerstein sent out today criticizing NY1, which hosted the debate, for not being explicit enough about banning written notes, and for "changing the rules" at the behest of the Spitzer...

Violence makes a strange ending for a love story, even if the setting is South Africa. But because Dan Jacobson has the ability to create sensitive, intelligent people and make them act sensitively and intelligently despite the background of guilt and shock, The Evidence of Love is neither propaganda nor sensationalism. It is, instead, a considerable artistic achievement, all the more impressive because it was written calmly out of the same tensions as created the South African explosion. It is the story of...

[The] Republic of Sarmeda is located somewhere outside the geography of history. It is the setting of Dan Jacobson's The Confessions of Josef Baisz, an account of a systematic traitor and police-spy whose confession of "my days as a petty functionary" is, at least partly, an allegory of the artist as political Judas. Like Judas, Josef Baisz "can love only through betrayal", and his justification of his sins contains occasional insights into the psychology of disloyalty. Ba...

For all the grimness of its subject, Dan Jacobson's facility of invention makes [The Confessions of Josef Baisz] a surprisingly lighthearted book. He obviously had a lot of fun inventing Sarmeda…. As a political fantasy it is at once playful and provocative, and as a study of the psychology of betrayal—that complex tangle of love, pity, self-hatred, and power-seeking—it is compelling. While a certain off-handedness makes me wonder if Jacobson was bringing all his considerable ene...