Tablet Magazine
Paul Auster (1947–2024)
Read Paul Berman’s review of 4 3 2 1, Auster’s novel about the late 1960s and all their Jewish rebelliousness
I have to admit that all this obsession with identity is one I don’t fully understand. Identity to me is my passport, which has my name and my photograph. I never considered my characters as being in any way confused about their identity. It is true, however, that they’re struggling, and that they suffer from loss or some other hardship and are trying to piece their lives back together, but these are universal struggles, neither Jewish nor non-Jewish. My ambition as a writer has always been to write about the meaningful things in a person’s life—being born, growing up, falling in love, being in love—and the experiences they create.
—Paul Auster, to Elad Zeret with Liel Leibovitz, on being Jewish
A Wandering Jew
See all in A Wandering Jew →︎
Marco Roth on literature and culture in exile.
Featured: David Mikics
Nearly 20 years after the great Jewish and American novelist’s death, we have never been more in need of his thirst for life
Harvard’s Derek Penslar Helps Make the World Safer for Antisemitism
A cultural studies professor who makes excuses for bigoted anti-Zionism is appointed to lead the university’s disingenuous ‘Task Force on Combating Antisemitism’
More ‘Anti-Zionist’ Insanity Your Kid Will Learn at NYU
Sonali Thakkar’s grotesque new book about Jewish ‘whiteness’ shows that the oldest hatred is also the most plastic
Susan Sontag and George Steiner star in ‘Maestros & Monsters’
Freed from the dreary, nauseating oppression of Ceausescu’s communist surveillance state, the great Romanian author is thrown back on himself, books, and the Jews
Shalom Goldman’s surprising Zionist allies
Shalom Goldman, Professor of Religion at Middlebury College, illuminates unexpected passions about Israel
John Steinbeck’s Promised Land
The great novelist’s travels in Israel showed him what America had lost
Raymond Carver, Israeli Writer
Though the great American storyteller never felt at home during his months in Tel Aviv, Israelis saw themselves in his direct sensibility
Philip K. Dick’s Last Great Obsession
The Dead Sea Scrolls blew the sci-fi writer’s mind
The poet’s philo-Semitism and visit to Jerusalem had a profound influence on him, and on Yehuda Amichai
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