Author

Marissa Brostoff

Staff Writer Marissa Brostoff, a veteran of the Forward, has written for The Hartford Courant and New Voices. She graduated from Wesleyan University with an interdisciplinary degree in history, literature, and philosophy. Her favorite fast day is Tisha B’Av.


Recently by Marissa Brostoff

Books

A New Leaf

Seventy years after the release of his first book, the bestselling ‘As a Driven Leaf,’ Rabbi Milton Steinberg (posthumously) offers a sophomore effort
By Marissa Brostoff | 7:00 AM Mar 19, 2010

In 1939, the same year Scarlett O’Hara mourned her lost Tara on the silver screen, a prominent Conservative rabbi named Milton Steinberg published a near-500-page work of historical fiction—never, for reasons that surely have to do with anti-Semitism, made into a movie—set in the era of the Talmudic sages.
The novel, As a Driven Leaf, tells ...

Books

Look Out!

Sam Lipsyte’s novel The Ask and Noah Baumbach’s movie Greenberg breathe new life into the figure of the shlemiel
By Marissa Brostoff | 7:00 AM Mar 12, 2010

Whither the shlemiel? According to a smart and much-discussed New York Magazine article last May, American Jewish prosperity has all but killed off the “neurotic, depressive, abrasive, excluded” antiheroes that once animated a comedic tradition running from Groucho Marx to Woody Allen. Larry David, entertainment critic Mark Harris argued in his essay, is keeping their ...

Daybreak: Israel Apologizes for “Embarrassment”

Plus, "Heroes of the Holocaust," nighttime raids, and a morality poll
By Marissa Brostoff | 9:05 AM Mar 10, 2010

• Israel’s interior minister says he is “very sorry for the embarrassment” resulting from his government’s approval yesterday of 1,600 new E. J’lem homes as Joe Biden arrived in the country to support peace talks—but the approval is still in effect. Biden’s now trying to reassure the P.A. that all is not lost. [AP]
• ...

Yehuda Halevi Rocks the Charts

New biography’s subject turns up in NYC play
By Marissa Brostoff | 2:00 PM Feb 18, 2010

Great medieval Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi is golden this month, and not just because he lived during the Golden Age of Spain. First, Nextbook Press—Tablet Magazine’s close relation—published an acclaimed biography of Halevi by Hillel Halkin, who argues that his subject was, in addition to the poet laureate of the Jewish people, in many ways ...

Education

Endnote

Amid financial shortfalls and a Conservative crisis, the Jewish Theological Seminary will shutter its cantorial school
By Marissa Brostoff | 2:03 PM Feb 11, 2010

As part of a major restructuring effort, the Jewish Theological Seminary announced last week that its cantorial school, traditionally separate from the rabbinical school, will be integrated into the rabbinical school. Henry Rosenblum, the well-regarded dean of the H.L. Miller Cantorial School, will be laid off. The move provoked an outcry from the seminary’s cantorial ...

Books

Portnoy’s Complaint, Zooey’s Remedy

Salinger may have predated Roth, but he was also a step ahead
By Marissa Brostoff | 7:00 AM Feb 5, 2010

A young man taking a long, languorous bath is paid a visit by his mother, who sits down (presumably on the toilet seat) to chat, and, despite her son’s half-hearted attempts to get rid of her, remains there for most of the next 48 pages. She’s come to talk about the young man’s college-aged sister, ...

‘Commentary’: Feminists Are Ruining Purim

But isn’t some reinterpretation necessary?
By Marissa Brostoff | 3:15 PM Feb 4, 2010

Purim is just around the corner (it begins February 28th), and that means just one thing: yummy yummy hamentaschen. Well, two things: yummy yummy hamentaschen and a long essay in Commentary decrying feminist reinterpretations of the holiday.
The article—by Abby Wisse Schachter, an editor at the New York Post—employs the common Commentary tactic of labeling a ...

A French Intellectual’s French Views of Islam

BHL in NYC
By Marissa Brostoff | 4:00 PM Jan 27, 2010

Bernard-Henri Lévy, self-styled bearer of the torch of Enlightenment and engagée intellectualism, was making the rounds in New York City this week. Last night, he got center stage at a panel discussion at Columbia cosponsored by the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA), which is essentially the French Anti-Defamation League. Topic: “Freedom of Expression: ...

Bike Battle Takes a Turn for the Civil

Brooklyn Hasids, cyclists debate controversial lane
By Marissa Brostoff | 4:00 PM Jan 26, 2010

Last we reported, the feud between Brooklyn’s Satmar Hasidim and the borough’s bicycle enthusiasts had rounded the bend into full-scale performance art: cycling activists, protesting the Department of Transportation’s removal of a bike lane that ran through the Satmar ’hood, scheduled a nude ride along the route where the lane had been, on Shabbos no ...

Books

Questions and Answers

Rebecca Goldstein discusses Spinoza, the ‘New Atheists,’ and the biggest question of all
By Marissa Brostoff | 7:00 AM Jan 15, 2010

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s new 36 Arguments for the Existence of God notes prominently on its cover that it is “a work of fiction.” But you can’t always judge a book by its cover. 36 Arguments is indeed a novel, if a pretty heady one: it tells the story of Professor Cass Seltzer, whose studies in ...