Literature
I. B. Singer’s Last LaughMonday, August 6, 2012 by David G. Roskies | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Like millions of his fellow immigrants to America, Isaac Bashevis Singer started over. In the beginning, he was a deadly serious Polish-Yiddish writer with world-literary ambitions.
Englishing the TalmudTuesday, June 26, 2012 by Yehudah Mirsky | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
According to a rabbinic tradition recorded in the Talmud (Shabbat 12b), God’s angels do not understand the Aramaic language in which the Talmud itself is mainly composed. As many a modern reader can testify, they’re hardly alone.
Editors' Picks
The Wedding Guests Have Goose Feet Damion Searls, Los Angeles Review of Books. In postwar America, I.B. Singer was the one who made it—into English, into the pages of Playboy and Esquire and the New Yorker, into big Hollywood movies, into being thought “modern.” But the identity politics that worked for Singer in the short term risk making him unread now.
The Forgotten Firebrand Sue Vice, H-Net. Appalled at the secularism of inter-war Anglo-Jewry, poet Izak Goller bemoaned “the gods of the shops and the warehouses / Hollow papier-mâché imitations of the Golden Calf of our ancestors!”
The Literature of Conversion D. G. Myers, Literary Commentary. Few outsiders to religion understand that conversion changes a person’s reading habits: Rilke gives way to Ratzinger, or Hemingway to the Hafetz Hayim.