Out and About: Iran beats Israeli Chess Record; Thorstein Veblen on Jewish Intellectualism

Detail from a mural by Maurice Sendak, now at the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia.

The finalists for the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature have been announced.
Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum and Library has become home to Maurice Sendak’s only mural.
Jonah Lehrer retrieves Thorstein Veblen’s forgotten essay on why Jews become intellectuals.
An Iranian grandmaster claims to have beaten an Israeli chess record after playing 614 people simultaneously in Tehran.
In The New Republic, Cynthia Ozick writes about the Saul Bellow letters, while David A. Bell looks back on “Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris.”

In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani welcomes, with reservations, “J.D. Salinger: A Life.”
According to Forward contributor John Semley, William Shatner isn’t just Shatner — he’s Shatnerian.
New hip-hop songs inspired by the Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings include “#Jan25,” named after a Twitter hashtag.
Roger Ebert calls the characters in “Just Go With It,” the new Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston-starring romantic comedy, “dumber than a box of Tinkertoys.”
Dave Nuttycombe remembers comedian Albert Brooks (born — yes — Albert Einstein), pioneer of the “freak mentality.”
A current exhibit in London shows the work of legendary photographer and rabbi’s daughter Eve Arnold.
New Voices magazine goes to the Safed Klezmer Festival.
Bob Dylan will play at the Grammy Awards together with fellow folkies Mumford & Sons and the Avett Brothers.
Dylan is also among the figures whose journals are currently on display at New York’s Morgan Library, along with those of Albert Einstein, Charlotte Bronte and John Steinbeck.

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