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PEOPLE OF THE NEXTBOOK
By Joshua Glenn Date
THE EXAMINED LIFE "THERE'S NOT A LOT of Jewish action figures," the former Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth told the Washington Post recently, explaining how his self-mocking style of onstage superheroics grew out of a childhood rage about anti-Semitism. "It's Spider-Man meets Groucho Marx," he said.
Here is one of the insights to be gleaned from Nextbook.org, a newly launched online digest of Jewish-themed cultural news and reviews. The website is funded by Nextbook, a nonprofit describing itself as a national initiative "to promote Jewish cultural literacy in new and innovative ways."
Nextbook.org's editor is Blake Eskin, a former editor and columnist for the Jewish weekly The Forward and author of "A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski." He explained his approach to Ideas. "Just like older Jewish people might scan the paper for 'capital-J' stories—an article, say, about a high-school track star who happens to be Jewish—I look for Jewish themes in news stories about, for example, 'The Matrix Reloaded,' which may have been banned by Egyptian censors because it seems to promote Zionism," he said.
But Nextbook.org isn't always frothy. The "Matrix Reloaded" item was bracketed, for example, by Eskin's own write-ups of the Anne Frank show at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Jules Feiffer's new play about McCarthyism. One can also find transcripts of the talks on anti-Semitism given at a
recent conference sponsored by the YIVO Institute in New York. As Eskin puts it, "David Lee Roth as Jewish superhero? A new book on forgiveness in the Jewish tradition? There's room for both types of story here."
This story ran in the Ideas section of the Boston Globe on 06/22/2003.
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