Nextbook: Filter Archive

False Idols

You won't see "Simon Cowell-style tirades" against the contestants on The Upcoming Voice; those "go against God's command that people be kind to one another." The American Idol-style search for "the next big thing in ultra-Orthodox Jewish music" is the brainchild of Radio Jerusalem DJ Menachem Toker, who sees his program as part of a larger cultural project to take "the best from the secular world, but...make it kosher," according to The Guardian.
08.27.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Growth Spurt

“I know what it is like to be confused and look for my identity and search for G-d,” says Y.A. author Sonia Levitin, describing her qualifications. Her novel Strange Relations—which just won the 2008 Sydney Taylor Book Award for Teen Readers—follows a young woman as she wrestles with "assumptions about Hasidic Jews and her own relationship to Judaism."
08.27.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Piecing It Together

The Dead Sea Scrolls are going digital. Until now, fragments have been dispersed throughout museum collections worldwide, but soon enough, "every undergraduate will be able to have a detailed look" at "one of the most sought-after and examined documents on earth," reports the N.Y. Times.
08.27.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Atonement

Clearly psyched about the upcoming holiday (42 days and counting!), Slate features "Yom Kippur," a poem by Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Schultz. He writes:
    You are asked to stand and bow your head,
    consider the harm you've caused,
    the respect you've withheld,
    the anger misspent...
08.26.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

A Separate Peace

"In addition to being a writer, you are also a human being, a citizen in your own country, extending from your family to your society and the world around you," Nadine Gordimer told an audience at May's Jerusalem International Writers Conference (The Palestine-Israel Journal has a transcript). "I luckily never suffered any threats of anti-Semitism. I only saw us as Jews who were white and part of the struggle against apartheid."
08.26.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Against Type

Turner Classic Movies is celebrating Tony Curtis, airing a day's worth of films starring the actor known to childhood friends as Bernie Schwartz. The New York Sun's Allen Barra takes the opportunity to recall Curtis's performance in 1961's The Outsider. "Those who can suspend their disbelief of a Jewish kid from the Bronx playing an American Indian," he writes, "can appreciate an extraordinary portrait of a man more alienated from mainstream America than any character played by Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, or Robert De Niro."
08.26.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Making Faces

In The New Yorker, John Updike reviews Fred E. Basten's new biography, Max Factor: The Man Who Changed the Faces of the World, which follows Hollywood's "diminutive Hercules" from his birth (as Max Faktor) in 1904 in the mill town of Lodz, to the forests of Bohemia (where he'd run to escape Russian anti-Semitism), to the Tinseltown labs of his company—where he devised false eyelashes and brewed more than six hundred gallons of light-olive makeup for Ben-Hur.
08.25.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Religious Predisposition

Jennifer Traig, the author of Well Enough Alone: A Cultural History of My Hypochondria, confirms that there's something "absolutely" Jewish about the disease. "There's some honor in" being sick, she tells the Forward, "so why wouldn’t we think we’re sick all the time?"
08.25.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Radio Days

Shalom Auslander always has trouble relaxing; on This American Life, he describes how an exceptionally charming Holocaust survivor almost ruined his tropical vacation.
Elsewhere on NPR, the pianist Menahem Pressler recounts the birth of the Beaux Arts Trio, which debuted at Tanglewood in 1955 and gave its final concert last week.
08.25.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

If These Walls Could Talk

"The bathroom is an intimate place, and to me the project is very intimate,” Sid Yiddish (aka Charles Bernstein) tells the Chicago Reader. A coordinator of the Bathroom Poetry Project, Yiddish also has plans for projects that extend beyond the stall walls: Next month, he'll be in "a display window of the Flatiron Building performing 'Suite for Furby on Shofar in D Minor,' a solo piece for his 13 Furby dolls."
08.22.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Family Secrets

In Haaretz, Shifra Horn pays a visit to Benjamin Disraeli's New Zealand-based great-granddaughter, whose grandmother, Catherine, was the product of the British statesman's tryst with a French woman. While her grandmother never really spelled out her pedigree, "she would give hints...she referred me to one of his books."
08.22.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Coming to Terms

Josh Lambert takes on the cultural history of the "dirty Jew," tracing it through the work of James Joyce and Norman Mailer to South Park. Noting that the evolution of the phrase reveals "not just changing perceptions of Jewishness over the years, but also a transformation in the way we talk about 'dirtiness,'" he tries to sort out the idiom's tangled web of anti-Semitism and sex for Jbooks.
08.22.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

The Far Side

The comics anthology Kramer's Ergot, edited by Sammy Harkham, makes "no compromises of any kind to the history of comic art or any other art, nor to politics, nor...to anyone's interpretation of Jewishness," writes self-professed "semi-scholarly critic" Paul Buhle in Jewcy. Buhle compares Harkham's own work to that of Chagall; it's "less joyous...but not necessarily less lyrical."
08.21.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Teen Spirit

When Beverly Hills, 90210 hit the air in the early '90s, some viewers noticed that the show didn't reflect the fact that the real Beverly Hills High was "both predominantly Jewish and heavily Iranian." The forthcoming new version attempts to amend this (sort of), but as Rebecca Spence writes in the Forward, since "most Jewish parts in American film and television have not been played by Jews," the show's casting is "in keeping with Tinseltown tradition."
08.21.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Jerusalem State of Mind

"I believe that peace, practically speaking, is closer than anyone realizes," Avrum Burg, former Peace Now activist, Jewish Agency chairman, Knesset Speaker, and (depending who you ask) "post-Zionist," tells The Jerusalem Post. In The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise from Its Ashes, he considers the future of the Jewish people and the state of Israel, concluding that "you can be a Jerusalemite in Monsey, and you can be a Babylonian in Tel Aviv. It's about your attitude."
08.21.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Keeping His Faith

When Catholic screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce began dramatizing the "apocryphal tale" of a group of Auschwitz prisoners who put God on trial (the verdict: guilty), he was introduced to a "long Jewish tradition of wrangling with God." The resulting film, God On Trial, "became about the fact that people might be capable of having a theological argument on the way to the gas chamber," he tells The Guardian.
08.20.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Mixed-Up Files

The N.Y. Times recounts the "research-intensive journey" that led to the identification of the subjects of a mysterious undated photograph as Marc Chagall and his wife Vava. The famous couple in the photo was initially thought to be David Ben-Gurion and his wife, leading the Times to observe that "the human eye can be unreliable in making positive identifications."
08.20.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Leo Abse, Member of Parliament

As the grandson of "the first Jew to speak Welsh with a Yiddish accent and Yiddish with a Welsh one," the notably well-dressed Abse was an unlikely choice for British Parliament. The MP, who died this week, made his mark as a social reformer, championing gay rights and the protection of children over the course of his thirty year parliamentary career.
08.20.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Words of Wisdom

Max Weinreich didn't want to publish the text of his opus, History of the Yiddish Language, without an equally massive set of footnotes, "even though no more than 10 people would consult them—and he knew all of them," as Ruth Wisse puts it. In the New York Post, Wisse writes that the book "rehabilitates" the language from comic triviality, ultimately arguing that "Yiddish is a repository of the Jewish way of life."
08.19.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Till Death Do Us Part

A "serious halachic dilemma" arose when a German man’s dying wish was "to be buried with his best friend, a bottle of vodka," according to the European Jewish Press. Jewish law forbids burying objects with the dead, but after rabbinic consultation, man and bottle were set to rest side by side.
08.19.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Unhappy Families

In What Happened to Anna K., Irina Reyn transplants Tolstoy's "Great Russian Soul" to a Jewish enclave in Queens, with an updated heroine who is "human, and wonderfully alive," according to the San Fransisco Chronicle. The Christian Science Monitor questions the book's contemporary social resonance, but concludes that Reyn succeeds in examining "how to forge an identity in an adopted country when your homeland has irrevocably changed."
08.19.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Out of Tune

In 1999, conductor Daniel Barenboim and Palestinian cultural theorist Edward Said joined forces to offer what The Guardian calls a "happy consortium as a model for the coexistence of cultures in the Middle East": their mixed Israeli and Arab West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. Yet, according to the review, each man's book on the project disappoints: Barenboim's Everything Is Connected is "an insubstantial volume...with a random sampling of interviews," while Said's posthumous essay collection Music at the Limits is "woefully deficient."
08.18.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Laughter and Tears

"If I was making fun of mental illness and I didn’t have it, it would be really tasteless," says British comedian Ruby Wax. "It’s the same rule that says you can make fun of being a Jew if you’re a Jew.” A child of Austrian-Jewish emigrés who's been fighting depression since childhood, Wax brings her latest show to the Edinburgh Fringe as part of a BBC-sponsored campaign for mental health.
08.18.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Halachic Law

"If you give a Jewish guy a ticket, it's very hard," worries new NYPD cadet Shmuel Tenenbaum, who's hoping for a post outside of his native Crown Heights. This is just one of many concerns facing the ten Orthodox Jews joining the force as part of the most observant class to date. The New York Post seems to have learned Yiddish for the occassion, reporting that the new, bagel-shmearing officers have successfully convinced their verklempt parents they ain't meshugana.
08.18.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Now That's a Metamorphosis!

Some Kafka scholars are refuting unseemly intimations about the writer that appear in James Hawes' new bio. "To call the illustrated magazines he subscribed to as hardcore porn, is like comparing a poem by Heinrich Heine with an advertising slogan for McDonald's," Anjana Shrivastava is quoted as saying in The Guardian; Hawes tells the paper his detractors "have pored over every memorandum he ever wrote, every insurance report he ever compiled, looking for clues. Yet they have chosen not to show this undoubtedly very dark stuff."
08.15.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

To Have and Have Not

"In caste-attuned India, there was always a Jewish pecking order," says The Economist in an appraisal of Edna Fernandes' The Last Jews of Kerala. The book examines the tensions between the different communities, including the Bene Israel.
08.15.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Jerry Wexler, Music Producer

Raised in Manhattan by immigrant parents, Wexler worked as a reporter for Billboard, where he coined the term rhythm and blues. After journalism, he turned to producing, signing on Led Zeppelin and working with other musicians, including Bob Dylan and Dire Straits. He died today.
08.15.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

By Any Other Nationality

Had they been French and not Italian, Elsa Morante and her husband Alberto Moravia "would have been as much celebrated as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir," according to Lily Tuck. Her biography, Woman of Rome, is a kind of "personal essay about the flights and vicissitudes attendant on a life...devoted to the imagination," according to The Washington Post.
08.14.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

There Will Be Blood

Brad Pitt's signed on to Quentin Tarantino's remake of Inglorious Bastards. The heartthrob is set to play Aldo the Apache, an American Jew named for his "signature move of scalping Nazi soldiers," according to the Forward.
08.14.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Moving On Up

In the United States, says Chaim Waxman, "the cost of Jewish living has become increasingly intolerable." His solution? Move to Israel. He makes his economic argument in The Jerusalem Post.
08.14.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)