Arts & Culture
Buczacz by Way of Newark: On Literary Lives at the EndThursday, January 10, 2013 by Jeffrey Saks | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Philip Roth has bowed out gracefully from the literary world. But for the great Hebrew writer S. Y. Agnon, retirement was never an option.
It’s All Happening at the ZooMonday, January 7, 2013 by D. G. Myers | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Howard Jacobson's latest novel, Zoo Time, is not immediately recognizable as Jewish fiction; but Jacobson again portrays the fear, uncertainty, and ambivalence that characterize the modern Jew.
Dr. Orlinsky and Mr. GreenFriday, January 4, 2013 by Michael Carasik | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Harry Orlinsky is best known today as “Mr. Green,” the scholar who authenticated the four Dead Sea Scrolls offered for sale in a Wall Street Journal want ad. But his legacy as a Bible scholar is enormous.
2012: A Year in BooksWednesday, January 2, 2013 by D. G. Myers | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Books are dying—everyone says so—but you couldn’t prove it by the Jews. 2012 was a very good year for Jewish books: here are the best 40.
Not Dead Yet: The Remarkable Renaissance of Cantorial MusicTuesday, December 25, 2012 by Allan Nadler | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
After a half-century of steady decline, two unlikely Jewish groups are reviving hazzanut.
Crossing Borders—Without PassportsWednesday, December 19, 2012 by Moshe Sokolow | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
“Crossing Borders,” a current exhibit at New York City’s Jewish Museum featuring works on loan from Oxford's Bodleian Library, displays medieval Jewish manuscripts embedded in their Christian and Muslim scribal milieus.
The Twenty-Seventh ManWednesday, November 28, 2012 by Diana Muir Appelbaum | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
On the night of August 12, 1952, a group of Yiddish writers was executed on Joseph Stalin’s orders for the crime of writing while Jewish. The executions were the tragic culmination of the grand romance between Jewish intellectuals and Marxism.
An Open Letter to Philip RothTuesday, November 20, 2012 by D.G. Myers | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Say it ain’t so. The news that you have decided to retire from the “awful field” of writing fiction is terribly upsetting. Not because your readers and critics might have paid more respectful attention to Nemesis if they’d only known that it was going to be your last book.
Jacob’s Sons in the Bishop’s PalaceWednesday, November 14, 2012 by Diana Muir Appelbaum | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
The current Baron Rothschild is one of the British philanthropists backing a new museum of Christianity in Britain, built around a dazzling series of thirteen Baroque paintings, each over eight feet tall.
Art and Idolatry in AustriaTuesday, October 30, 2012 by Alex Joffe | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Art transforms life through beauty but inspires a possessiveness unlike any other. Collectors tend toward obsession, which overwhelms morality; museums, like the medieval church, wash away sin with exhibitions for the public good.
Editors' Picks
A Sephardic Agnon Daniel Bouskila, Jewish Journal. "Where are the wordplays of the Sephardic kabbalists, the homiletics of the Aleppo scholars, the halakhic terminology of Moroccan rabbis?" wondered author Haim Sabato. "Who will sketch their profiles, in their language?"
Art That's "Too Jewish" Bernard Starr, Algemeiner. Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millet was aiming to revive the Christian pathos of early-Renaissance art. But critics attacked him for "portraying the youthful Savior as a red-headed Jew boy."
The Retrospective A B. Yehoshua, Jewish Fiction .net. "Do you no longer believe in a world of transcendence . . . so much so that you are mired in the mundane and the obvious? For example, in the film Potatoes . . . your main characters eat lunch for 16 minutes." (Fiction)
Teaching Like Strauss Lee Trepanier, Imaginative Conservative. Countering the scientization of the academy, Leo Strauss defended philosophy as the route to understanding "the dignity of the mind," and thereby "the true ground of the dignity of man."
Everything New Is Old Again Jason Guriel, Parnassus Review. More than 30 years ago, Charles Bernstein and the Language poets tried to startle readers by freeing words from the illusion of meaning. Today’s readers may be less surprised.
The Storyteller’s Gift Robert Pinsky, New York Times. Retrospective, the new novel by Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua, “undertakes to conjure nothing less than the enigmatic, irresistible majesty of the past that governs human action.”
Another Post-Pesach Celebration Gabriel T. Erbs, New Voices. Two craft brewers near Portland, Oregon, celebrate Passover’s end by making Matzobraü, with crushed-up leftover matzah added to the fermenting mash. Only whole wheat matzah, of course.
Prisoners of War: a Rorschach Deborah Kamin, Foreign Policy. The TV show Homeland has captivated U.S. audiences with its cliffhangers about a returned POW as possible foreign agent. Its Israeli counterpart, Hatufim, has a very different appeal.
Learning with Harold Bloom Maria Popova, Brain Pickings. Critic Harold Bloom used the structure of the Kabbalah for his book analyzing 100 geniuses. Now an Italian team of artists and graphic designers is translating the book into pictures.
Zuckerman Abridged Max Ross, New Yorker. "The recent discovery of hundreds of notebooks and journals hidden throughout Zuckerman’s home in the Berkshires explains, at least in part, the seclusion and silence that marked his final 35 years." (Fiction)