Nextbook: Filter Archive

Stuck in the Middle

Before visiting Israel, Arnon Grunberg recalled Abel Herzberg's saying, "A Jew without Israel is like a loan without collateral." Grunberg wonders whether the country may in fact be "more of an albatross around one's neck," but ultimately decides not to choose: "Without a conclusion either way came an essential element of freedom."
05.15.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

From the Mailbag

A 1954 letter from Einstein being auctioned today clarifies his feelings about religion. Calling the Bible a collection of "primitive legends which are...pretty childish," he writes, "the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong...are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power."
Speaking of which, there is still time to get tickets to Nextbook's "Jews and Power" festival this Sunday, May 18, in New York City.
05.15.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Cool Factor

The N.Y Times sizes up the city's diverse Jewish art scene. Not surprisingly, they omit Lower East Side designer Apollo Braun (born Doron Braunshtein), mastermind of the $250 "Jews Against Obama" t-shirt.
05.15.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Art and Science

Rivka Galchen's father, an Israeli immigrant, encouraged her to go to med school before pursuing her real passion: "He sort of felt like, you know, Primo Levi's a chemist, and then he writes something." Perhaps this step helped make her "a bold, curious techno-utopian," who, according to The NY Observer, is an heir to Pynchon.
05.14.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Heal the World

Efforts are underway to repair Myanmar's one synagogue after last week's cyclone (the Jewish community there has 20 people). The Jewish Telegraphic Agency has the story.
05.14.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Personal as Political

Former mayor Jerry Springer talks to the AV Club about maintaining political optimism despite the trashy tales he facilitates on television: "In one generation my family went from extermination simply because of how they pray to God to this ridiculously privileged life I live today. So how can I not love America?" This American Life tells more of Springer's surprising story.
05.14.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

The High Road

"It is a moral idiot who thinks that anti-Semitism is a threat only to Jews," snarls Christopher Hitchens, drawing a distinction between the future of a "state for Jews" and a Jewish state. The whole Israel conundrum reminds him of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "aphorism about the necessity of living with flat-out contradiction."
05.13.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Opposites Attract

Writing in Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, Heidi Rain recalls her fascination with a catechism booklet-toting childhood friend. "It was probably my first encounter with anything so conceptual, so metaphoric. Like sin." As a Reform Jew, "there wasn't just one right way. There were options."
05.13.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Great Orator

Jeffrey Goldberg—in his role as ambassador of Jewish interests—peppers Barack Obama with questions. The candidate gamely drops references to Leon Uris, David Grossman, and a Zionist camp counselor: "I always joke that my intellectual formation was through Jewish scholars and writers, even though I didn't know it at the time."
05.13.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Irena Sendler, Rescuer

Sendler, who died yesterday at the age of 98, smuggled 2,500 children out of the Warsaw ghetto, and was one of the first "righteous gentiles" honored by Yad Vashem. In the ultimate sign of celebrity, a TV movie about her life is about to go into production.
05.13.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Buried Treasure

Florence Wolfson's 70-year-old diary—which Lily Koppel found in a dumpster—"captured the passions and ambitions of an intensely creative young Jewish woman." Koppel's own book, The Red Leather Diary, gives this source material a "lovely shine," writes Alana Newhouse.
05.12.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

To Serve and Protect

The original membership of the Crown Heights Shmira, a neighborhood watch group, was "conspicuously multiethnic." Today its volunteers, who make rounds in a police-like vehicle, are all Jews; questions have been raised about it being a truly "passive patrol."
05.12.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Soup for the Soul

NYC's only kosher soup kitchen is designed to look like a restaurant, since it may be "highly embarrassing" to be seen going there. "They treat you like a mensch, not a second-class citizen," one patron explains.
05.12.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Nextbook Festival of Ideas

Nextbook's "Jews and Power" festival in NYC is on May 18. For info on how to join us, click here. For a taste of what's in store, check out participant Aaron David Miller: "Jews and their non-Jewish allies have a powerful voice on America's Middle East policies, but they should not and do not have a veto."
05.09.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Familiar Territory

Unlike many of the scholars committed to reviving Yiddish, performer and archivist Mendy Cahan, founder of Israel's YUNG YiDiSH Centre, was raised with the language. "His life replicates in a nutshell the process of modernization that affected an entire people and produced that powerful amalgam of Hasidic themes and cosmopolitan disenchantment that is Yiddish literature," says Haaretz.
05.09.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Hip to Be Square

Marissa Brostoff traces the evolution of hipster style to two iconic musicians. Lou Reed, she says, got points by "identifying himself with urban Jews of an earlier generation"; Jonathan Richman, meanwhile, continues his attempt "to maintain the demeanor of a Bar Mitzvah boy trying to rustle up the courage to ask a pretty girl to dance."
05.09.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Free at Last

Laura Bialis's Refusenik examines the movement to liberate Soviet Jews. The Jewish Week suggests that, with genocide in Darfur and continued problems in Russia, the film "should serve as both an organizing tool and a cautionary tale." As for the myriad interviewees, including Natan Sharansky: "It doesn't take anything away from their bravery to say the film about them gets tedious," says The SF Chronicle.
05.09.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

In His Own Words

The Times Literary Supplement explores the concept of intertextuality in a review of The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi. Contributors see Levi as "a double agent, engaged in 'ironic rewriting of divine utterances in secular terms.'"
05.08.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Developing Intolerance

Michael Kimmelman assesses the rise of anti-Semitism in Hungary. While Communism attempted to eradicate differences, the opposite may have since become a problem: "What is now being denied here is the notion that Jews, no matter how we behave, are the same as non-Jews," a sociologist tells him.
05.08.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Riding the Waves

Surfwise portrays "Doc" Paskowitz, a legendary health-nut who brought surfing to Israel, as "the alpha-male antithesis of the shtetl Jew." The film operates in "colorful-geezer mode," says The Village Voice; Paskowitz complains director Doug Pray "wanted to make me an oddball." Tony Michels included Paskowitz in his take on Jews who hang ten.
The LA Jewish Film Festival kicks off tonight; a highlight—Little Traitor, based on Amos Oz's Panther in the Basement.
05.08.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

The Cat Came Back

The Rabbi's Cat 2, the latest installment in Joann Sfar's graphic novel series about an observant talking feline in 1930s Algeria, drifts "between precise historical details, enthusiastic tall tales and meditations on what it means to live as a person of faith in a world that doesn't share it," says Douglas Wolk.
05.07.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

By Any Other Name

Haaretz reprints a letter in which writer Aharon Reuveni claims credit for naming the Jewish state in 1948. In it, he summarily rejects "all manner of bizarre, faulty, untoward and tasteless names" including "State of the Hebrews." Israel, he wrote, "hints at man's war with the forces of nature, which is the basis for all human progress."
05.07.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Ilyas Malayev, Musician

"What Malayev knows almost nobody knows," a colleague once said of the performer, composer, and poet legendary in the Bukharan community. In Queens, his adopted hometown, he was known for his interpretation of traditional folk music that "originated as the court music of feudal Bukhara." Malayev died last week.
05.07.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Nextbook's Festival of Ideas

Nextbook is hosting "Jews and Power," a festival of ideas, in NYC on May 18. Come hear Cynthia Ozick, Shalom Auslander, Ruth Wisse, and others. Click here for details.
05.06.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Silver Lining

In his upcoming book, provocateur Avraham Burg reiterates that the Holocaust must be remembered, "but no longer by prostrating ourselves in the dust." Perhaps he would be buoyed by an "oddly vibrant exhibition" at Yad Vashem featuring the contributions of survivors, particularly in the design realm.
05.06.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Midwestern Hospitality

After gathering articfacts for the past 14 years, Jewish Museum Milwaukee has opened its doors, and has a special display about native daughter Golda Meir. The city "is a microcosm of America," says the museum's executive director.
05.06.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Animal Wrongs

The undercover PETA agents who busted kosher slaughterhouse AgriProcessors in 2004 have outed themselves to bring publicity to their cause. Hannah and Philip Schein are concerned that Orthodox practices have gotten "so focused on the letter of the law that they've lost sight of the fact that [kashrut] is about reducing suffering."
05.06.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

Fact in Fiction

In Reinhold Kramer's new biography, Canadian author Mordecai Richler seems "so vividly alive that I wanted to keep hanging out with the irascible old master," says the Globe and Mail; however, the book "focuses too relentlessly on Richler in relation to Judaism." Fixated on "the elements of Richler's fiction that shed light on his life," says the Toronto Star, Kramer veers into "some disturbingly naïve Freudianisms."
05.05.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

One of a Kind

The Jerusalem Post reports on Circumcise Me, a documentary about Yisrael Campbell, a former Catholic and recovered addict who's now an Orthodox Jew and a popular Israeli comedian. Filmmakers David Blumenthal and Matthew Kalman used phrases from tourist apparel to title the movie's segments after seeing "the ultimate slogan—boxer shorts which said 'I'm Jewish, wanna check?'" The Economist calls the film "hilarious and moving."
05.05.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (0)

The Dull Truth

As a teenager, David Goldberg found Theodor Herzl's allegorical Zionist novel Altneuland "prosaic and boringly didactic." Fifty years later, he says it has "not improved in the meantime," but admits it was "prescient in anticipating how the Jewish colony in Palestine" would develop.
05.05.08 | EMAIL | PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)