Your email has been sent.
J.D. Salinger Dies
‘The Catcher in the Rye’ author was Jewish
The wires are reporting that J.D. Salinger died at 91. The ultra-reclusive author—a Jew who grew up in Manhattan—published only four books in his lifetime: one novel, The Catcher in the Rye; one story collection, Nine Stories; and two collections of two novellas each, Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. The Glass family, which featured in many of his stories, was half-Irish, half-Jewish; so were the Salingers, though, according to Wikipedia, his mother passed as Jewish (without converting) and J.D. himself had a bar mitzvah.
Though we can be sad for his passing, in another sense this is actually potentially exciting news. Salinger has not published a book since 1963; the last thing of any kind he published, a story, appeared in The New Yorker in 1965. Since then, he has lived almost as a hermit in New Hampshire. We will now see if his typewriter has been on these past 45 years. Here’s hoping it has been.
How an Alabama Doctor Became a Rabbi to His Patients at a Groundbreaking AIDS Clinic
In his memoir ‘Positive,’ Michael Saag warns that our broken health care system is more dangerous than the AIDS epidemic
Leonard Cohen’s Long, Strange, Sometimes Tortured Road to Mastering His Own Sound
Liel Leibovitz, who has a new book out on the rock ’n’ roll poet, looks at how Cohen’s songs evolved from bleak to transcendent
‘Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah’: Inside 19th-Century Yiddish Letter-Writing Manuals
Correspondence templates taught Jews both literacy and how to be modern. A new anthology shows their entertainment value.
- Katy Perry, The Bar Mitzvah DJ
- Spotlight On: Andrew Steinthal, Co-founder of ‘The Infatuation’
- Haim Rocks Out at Coachella
- Susan Sontag Documentary to Debut at the Tribeca Film Festival
