New York’s Activist History That Changed City and Nation
Jesus: Father, Husband, Family Man
Evolutionary Biology After Auschwitz
Broiling Mojave Spawns 'Angry Buddhist'
Taking a Second Look at Lillian Hellman
Jews, the Left and the Rest
Harpooning a Hebrew ‘Moby Dick’
'Five-Year Engagement' Signals Evolution of Jewish Leading Man
New Book Examines Hebrew Poetry in America
Remembering Mother in Graphic Form
Eytan Fox’s Latest Feature Premiers at the Tribeca Film Festival
Israeli Musician Collaborates With Mali's Vieux Farka Toure
Vidal: A Jewish Soldier of the Hair Salons
Etgar Keret Gets Streetwise
Deciding Which New Spiritual Leaf To Turn Over
Is 'Tanakh' a Good Name for the Hebrew Bible in English?
Adam Yauch and the Adolescent Sublime
Jews Are a 'Race,' Genes Reveal
Britain's Jewish Press Baroness
Is 'Halachic' Going Mainstream?
Living With Isaac Bashevis Singer
Re-Evaluating Jacob Gordin, the ‘Yiddish Shakespeare’
How Do You Say 'Freebie' in Hebrew?
Break Dancing Across the Green Line
Battling Horror With the Absurd
A 'Crazy' Look at Paris Strip Palace
Dannie Abse Brings Jewish Twist to Wales
Figuring Out Origins of Yiddish Names Is Linguistic Trip
A.M. Klein Laid Groundwork for Jewish Poetry in English
Cataloguing the 'Missed Destiny of Death'
Was Adolf Hitler Leader or Follower?
Giving Voice to Kabbalah Masters
Sisters in Skivvies on the Lower East Side
What Should We Call Christian Bible?
'Homegrown' Story of West Coast Jews
Meeting Fearless Dissidents Over Burgers
Italian-Jewish Historian Learned From Heretics and Heroes
The Very First Jew for Jesus
Famed Warsaw Ghetto Image, Repeated Over and Over
The Case for Community
Oldest Living Shoah Survivor Still Smiling
Haggadah, New and Improved
Why Are American Jews So Liberal?
Jewish Gangsters Get Their Day at Museum
Arikha's Art of Rigor and Confrontation
Difference Between a Slob and a 'Zhlob'
Any artist working in “World Music” (likely the vaguest genre for which Billboard tracks sales) has to determine the role traditional sounds play in their compositions. They hang suspended between the present and the past; too much fealty to the canon and the recordings become academic exercises in evoking a world long gone. Update your sound too much and you risk severing your connection to the folk vernacular entirely. After all, all music comes from somewhere in the world but no one calls Lady Gaga “World Music.”
This conflict between history and the now is dramatically enacted in Sarah Aroeste’s music. Not only does Aroeste labor in an idiom that dates back to the 15th century, but she does so for an audience that doesn’t even speak the language. Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish language of much of the Sephardic diaspora, is spoken by less than 100,000 people around the world today, most of whom live in Israel. Aroeste, is not the only Ladino singer in 2012, but with Gracia, her third album, she is its most public face.
Crossposted from Haaretz
The Israeli cabinet approved the establishment in Jerusalem of an Albert Einstein museum on Sunday, which will display items from the estate of the man who is considered the greatest scientist of the 20th century.
A sum of NIS 1 million from the budget of the Prime Minister’s Office’s national-heritage promotion program will be allocated to planning the museum, a joint project of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Jerusalem Development Authority. The museum will exhibit some of the more than 80,000 documents in the university’s Albert Einstein Archives.
“The idea of creating a center that would make the treasures in the archive available to the general public has been around for a long time,” Prof. Hanoch Gutfreund, a former president of the university and academic director of the archives, said on Sunday.
Jonathan B. Krasner is the author of the National Jewish Book Award winning title “The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education.” Krasner was also a finalist for the 2012 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit:
One of the greatest dilemmas I faced while writing “The Benderly Boys & American Jewish Education” was how to refer to the group of Jewish educators who were mentored by New York Bureau of Jewish Education director Samson Benderly. At first glance the answer seemed deceptively simple. Benderly referred to his protégés as my “boys,” and the moniker “Benderly boys” was widely used both by members of the group and their colleagues in the field.
And yet, the appellation is problematic. For one thing, in today’s world the term “boy” or “girl” when used in reference to a grownup has taken on a pejorative, or at the very least, a paternalistic connotation. This usage has largely become anachronistic, a relic of the “Mad Men” and “Driving Miss Daisy” era.
The New Republic has hired back Franklin Foer as editor.
Crown Heights gets a Hasidic art gallery.
Could Boris Gelfand become the first Israeli world chess champion?
Zackary Sholem Berger explores the Hasidic literary underground.
White-collar criminal Andrew G. Bodnar wasn’t just ordered to write a book as part of his sentence, he also considered “Call me a schlemiel” as the opening line.
Earlier this week, Dvora Meyers wrote about being an Orthodox Jewish gymnast and the designer of her book cover. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit:
What happens when the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, the Ninth of Av, which memorializes the destruction of King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, coincides with you learning about the U.S. women’s victory at the 1996 Olympics, arguably the happiest gymnastics moment in my 20-year relationship with the sport? Should I cry for the Temple? Or flip for the Magnificent Seven?
Unfortunately, the rabbis never bothered with these (and other) questions in their responsa. I was forced to answer them on my own (I flipped and then felt guilty about it, thus covering both my Jewish and gymnastics bases).
The text above is a snippet from the introduction to “Heresy on the High Beam.” In it, I allude to a story that I never ended up writing out (though I did tell it at my Leotard Optional book launch party, which was just like a “black tie” event except with a lot more spandex). Since I didn’t include the anecdote in any of the essays, I’m giving it away for free here.
Daniel Okrent has a punch line ready when he’s asked how he discovered “Old Jews Telling Jokes,” the Web-video-series-turned-book that became a viral sensation in 2009. “I became an old Jew,” said the esteemed historian, inventor of the fantasy game Rotisserie League Baseball and first public editor of The New York Times.
Now, Okrent can add “playwright” to his résumé. With co-creator Peter Gethers, the 64-year-old writer has broadened the site’s premise into a full-blown off-Broadway production — and won backing from the heavyweight producers of shows like “Company,” “A Little Night Music” and “Sweeney Todd.” The stage version of “Old Jews Telling Jokes” opens May 20 at Manhattan’s Westside Theatre. After casting was completed, The Arty Semite caught up with Okrent at his Manhattan home.
Michael Kaminer: You were the first public editor of The New York Times, and your most recent book, “Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition,” is an acclaimed history of Prohibition. “Old Jews Telling Jokes” sounds like a bit of a departure.
Earlier this week, Dvora Meyers wrote about being an Orthodox Jewish gymnast. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit:
As a writer, I’ve paid scant attention to the images that accompany my work. I’m usually too preoccupied with the phrasing and timing of jokes to fret over the all-important. That’s why one of my websites looks like this. (I hope you didn’t just die of purple.)
I’m not at all trying to downplay the importance of art in storytelling. I’m simply admitting to my own deficit in this department. And I would’ve probably gone on not caring about the visual component to my work had it not been for Margarita Korol, the urban pop artist that who created the vibrant cover to my new book, “Heresy on the High Beam.”
Allow me to backtrack for a moment. I met Margarita while I was an intern at Tablet, where she creates illustrations that accompany many of the articles. Almost right away, I decided I liked her when I realized she wore earrings as big as mine. Yes, a big pair of hoops is all it takes to secure my friendship.
Aaron Sorkin has signed on to write the script for a Steve Jobs biopic.
Aharon Appelfeld’s “Blooms of Darkness” has won the British Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Read our review of the novel here.
The online Museum of Family History has a new exhibit on “The Remarkable Zalmen Zylbercweig,” editor of the six-volume “Lexicon of the Yiddish Theatre.”
Joseph Epstein reflects on his friendship with art critic Hilton Kramer in The New Criterion.
Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
Maggie Gyllenhaal is no stranger to playing strong, confident women. The Academy Award-nominated actress has played roles ranging from a journalist and single mom in “Crazy Heart” to a liberal and outspoken academic in “Mona Lisa Smile.” Her latest film, “Hysteria,” which opens May 18, is set in London during the Victorian era, when various female “afflictions” — melancholia, frigidity and nymphomania among them — were bunched together and labeled “hysteria.” The supposed cause: a disorder of the uterus. The preferred treatment: “manual stimulation” of the womb.
In the film, Dr. Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy) joins the practice of a “hysteria” specialist, Robert Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce). Granville becomes engaged to the very proper Dalrymple daughter, Emily (Felicity Jones). But what good film is without conflict? Granville falls for Emily’s sister, Charlotte (Gyllenhaal), a firebrand progressive fighter for women’s rights. Gyllenhaal spoke to The Arty Semite by phone about the strong women in her life, eating Jewish deli on Christmas and attending her first Orthodox Seder.
Curt Schleier: Tell me a little about your background.
Maggie Gyllenhaal: My father [director Stephen Gyllenhaal] was raised in the Swedenborgian religion — kind of a Christian mystic religion — and he grew up in a small Pennsylvania town. My mother [screenwriter Naomi Gyllenhaal] is Jewish and grew up in Brooklyn.
Until “The Dictator,” only a certain class of people appreciated Sasha Baron Cohen’s sense of humor — a class that fell between freshmen and juniors. In previous incarnations — as Ali G, Borat and Bruno — Cohen’s humor centered on putting unsuspecting people in awkward situations. It was occasionally funny, but more often just painful to watch.
Cohen’s new film is not only superior to anything he’s done before, it is easily the funniest picture of the year. From the film’s opening dedication — “In loving memory of Kim Jong-il” — to its politically potent conclusion — the title character wins re-election with what appears to be well over 100% of the vote — “The Dictator” is a seemingly unending gag reel.
The jokes ranges from sharp, hilarious satire to scatological references, and he hits his target at least nine out of ten times. It’s one of those rare instances where the trailer doesn’t spoil the film.
General Admiral Haffaz Aladeen has been the undisputed ruler of oil-rich Wadiya since childhood. He has awarded himself hundreds of advanced degrees, Olympic medals and even a Wadiyan Golden Globe for his performance in “You’ve Got E-mail Bomb.”
After I was mercifully saved from the bourgeois enjoyment of a sailing trip off the Horn of Africa in 2008 by the merciful boats of the Navy of Wadiya, I spent several months lying prostrate at the doors of a Wadiyan palace hoping that the then Colonel-General Aladeen would release me.
In early 2010 he deigned to lean out of the door and cover me in the divine mouth-water that meant I would be free to leave as soon as my family sent him a Mercedes Benz S600 and a copy of Lil Wayne’s “Rebirth.” So it was with great personal fondness that I submitted a few questions to him via the intimate medium of email.
Dan Friedman: The peoples of Egypt and Tunisia rose up against their very own rulers. What can dictators do about the Arab spring?
Colonel-General Aladeen: I think that the Arab Spring is a passing fad, like the Atkins diet, or human rights, and you’ll find that pretty soon it will turn into the Crackdown Summer, Torture Fall and Execution Winter. But you know the Arab Spring could have been avoided. I told Mubarak a thousand times: “If you get Wi-Fi in your palace, put a f**king password on it. The people will start using it.”
Today is Viennese-Jewish author Arthur Schnitzler’s 150th Birthday. One of the key modernist writers in the German-speaking world, Schnitzler (1862–1931) is regrettably little-known in America. In his plays, stories and novels, Schnitzler painted a vivid portrait of his place and time, fin-de-siècle Vienna. He was also one of the most controversial and experimental writers, both for his psychological realism and his sexual frankness. Freud considered him a kindred spirit and famously wrote to Schnitzler that the author had discovered through intuition and creativity everything that Freud had uncovered via scientific experimentation.
In Europe, the occasion is being marked with critical editions of Schnitzler’s works, film and lecture series and new productions of his plays.
The center of the Schnitzler festivities is, not surprisingly, Vienna. The Burgtheater is presenting its productions of “Professor Bernhardi” and “Das weite Land,” (adapted by Tom Stoppard as “The Undiscovered Country”) while the Theater in der Josefstadt just premiered a staged version of “Traumnovelle,” a story perhaps best known as the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut.”
In conjunction with its conference on “Jews and the Left” (see our story here), the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has prepared an outstanding exhibition called “Shades of Red: Yiddish Left-Wing Press in America,” curated by Krysia Fisher and on view until September, 2012. Among the highlights of the exhibition is a series of arresting covers for the Communist monthly Der Hammer, many of them by William Gropper (1897-1977), one of America’s most significant social realist illustrators and painters.
Gropper’s is a classic Jewish American story. His immigrant parents settled on the Lower East Side and worked in the garment industry. He lost an aunt in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which some scholars cite as the reason for his politics. Though, as the conference demonstrated, radicalism was a vibrant part of Jewish life at the time.
Gropper studied art in public school and a portfolio of his work led Frank Parsons to admit him to the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts (now Parsons The New School For Design). Gropper worked as an illustrator for Yiddish and English publications including The New York Tribune, The Liberator, The Masses, The New Masses, Vanity Fair and, of course, Der Hammer.
Crossposted from Haaretz
Ruth Wiesler, one of two sisters claiming to be the heirs of Franz Kafka’s manuscripts, and who had been battling the State of Israel over their possession, has died at age 80. Wiesler and her sister, Eva Hoffe, claimed they inherited the manuscripts from their mother, Esther Hoffe, who had been the secretary of Max Brod, Kafka’s close friend and heir to his literary estate. Esther Hoffe died in 2007 at the age of 101.
The state, however, argues that Brod’s will clearly stated that “manuscripts, letters and other documents will be given over for safekeeping to the library of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, or the municipal library of Tel Aviv, or another public archive in Israel or outside Israel,” and as such, they had never been Hoffe’s property to begin with.
Of the two sisters, Wiesler, who died two weeks ago, was seen as more willing to come to a compromise. It remains to be seen whether her two daughters, who will presumably inherit her part of the Hoffe estate, will take the same moderate line. Wiesler’s attorney, Harel Ashwall, said: “The legal hearings in the case made a decisive contribution to the deterioration of her health.”
Standard halacha, or Jewish law, demands that Jews take their disputes to a court of Jewish law — a beit, or beth, din. It’s a hard sell in countries where Jewish courts have no power of enforcement and the secular courts seem fair. To get Jews to follow the policy in real life, rabbis have to convince them that their courts provide just and prompt resolutions to disputes. The recently produced first issue of The Journal of the Beth Din of America, published in collaboration with the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary of Yeshiva University, seems a sophisticated effort to do just that.
The journal features an article by Rabbi Yaacov Feit that gives a straightforward history of this policy. For Jews to take their disputes to any court other than a beit din is an insult to the Torah, according to the Talmud and later classical sources. Yet Feit does not ask whether it insults the Torah to study other legal systems, or to earn a living from them. Should a Jew attend law school in America, or serve as a lawyer or judge? Working as a lawyer also seems an insult to the Torah, but Feit does not consider this case. In practice, many observant Jews do earn their livelihoods in American law.
Dvora Meyers is the author of “Heresy on the High Beam: Confessions of an Unbalanced Jewess.” Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit:
When you tell someone that you used to do gymnastics, she frequently answers that she, too, did it. When she was 7. And hadn’t thought about it in years. The implication is clear — gymnastics is the sort of sport you’re supposed to outgrow. In most instances, you start doing it before you know how to sign your own name and it’s over by your first adolescent growth spurt, joining the childhood hobby trash heap, which for me includes rollerblading and playing with Barbie dolls.
But in my case, I couldn’t seem to shake the sport unlike the rest of my practice peers, who ended their involvement with gymnastics by the end of high school. There I was, about to start grad school in creative nonfiction at 23, still checking the online message boards devoted to the sport daily in order to learn which Romanian gymnast had a new vault or who was injured and or who quit and so on. (The gymnastics community, both online and in real life, is especially tight knit for the same reasons that Jews tend to cluster together — there are so few of us who give a damn.)
Crossposted from Haaretz
On Friday evening, in the children’s area of the Yaarot Menashe festival complex, you could hear a young mother calling her child, “Geva, come, the show is starting soon.” Since there aren’t many 5-year-olds named Geva, and because Geva is the name of one of the stars of the Israeli indie scene, one could toy with the idea that little Geva was named after big Geva, singer Geva Alon. There’s a good chance that isn’t actually the case, but at that moment, in light of the large number of children running around in the festival area, and in light of the tightly knit communal atmosphere in the place, one might be tempted to fantasize about the small Israeli indie nation as a cultural body in which young parents name their children after the heroes of the scene (“Asaf, Yehu, stop fighting and go play with Uzi and Daniela”).
Children are part of the landscape of the independent music festivals that have sprung up in recent years, but there seemed to be more of them than ever at the Yaarot Menashe festival, which took place this past weekend, in a forest in the north, somewhere between Megiddo and Yokne’am. If at the previous indie festivals the vast majority of the audience was composed of people aged 20 to 30 (an estimation, of course, not a fact) who had not yet begun raising families, the 2012 Yaarot Menashe festival was a gathering of young people and families.
Jordan has freed the publisher of an online newspaper charged with propagating “anti-regime sentiment.”
Actor Elliott Gould has become the new face of Aish HaTorah.
Watch Mandy Patinkin speaking at a Peace Now conference in Jerusalem.
Read an excerpt from Isaac Bashevis Singer and Maurice Sendak’s “Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories.”
Seth Lipsky defends the Obama campaign’s new “Forward” slogan.
The Cameri Theatre’s production of “Cabaret” was selected as the “Play of the Year” at the Israeli Theatre Prizes. Read our review of the play here.
Sheva Zucker’s late mother Miriam was still attending a women’s Yiddish reading group in Winnipeg until just a few months before she died last January at age 97. So, even before her mother passed away, Zucker knew what the best way would be to memorialize her.
“My mother was never a shul-goer, and davening is not the fullest expression of my Judaism, either,” Zucker, executive director of the League for Yiddish, told The Arty Semite. “I wanted some way some other than just saying Kaddish that was more meaningful for her and for me.”
That desire led Zucker to create a blog titled “*Liderlikht,” or “Candles of Song,” within weeks of her mother’s passing. The blog, on which she posts Yiddish poems about mothers, went live on February 9. Each week, she posts a different poem in its original Yiddish, with English translation and transliteration. She also includes a brief biography of each poet.
“Candles of Song” comes from a line in the first poem Zucker posted, “Frum” (Piously), by Rashel Veprinski: “Piously as my mother the waxen wicks / I light my candle of song.” Veprinski (1896-1981) came to New York from Ukraine in 1907, and began writing poetry at age 15. She was first published in 1918 in the journal “Di Naye Velt,” and she went on to write several books of poetry, as well as an autobiographical novel, short stories, and many articles for Yiddish periodicals. From the 1920s she lived with the famous Yiddish writer Mani Leyb, until his death in 1953.
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree
When you combine the sizzling artistry of violinist Alicia Svigals with the smoldering film presence of Pola Negri, the silent film star and Hollywood darling of the interwar years, sparks are sure to fly.
Building on the current fascination with the world of silent films, which “The Artist” and “Hugo” set in motion, the Washington Jewish Music Festival will screen The Yellow Ticket, a 1918 film, on May 21. Less than an hour in length, this full throttled melodrama explores the triangulated relationship of Jewish identity, prostitution and modernity through its focus on a Jewish woman’s unhappy experiences in St. Petersburg.
The Polish actress whose long red lacquered nails and off-screen romances with Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino prompted The New York Times to dub her the “queen of screen vamps,” the “starriest of stars,” played a Jewish heroine so convincingly that Hitler and Goebbels forbade the showing of her films in Germany because they believed she was Jewish.
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