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The Week In Rear View, January 19 Edition

All the news that’s fit to skim

by
Jesse Bernstein
January 19, 2018
(JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)
President Barack Obama presents the National Humanities Medal to Philip Roth during a ceremony at the White House in Washington.(JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)
(JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)
President Barack Obama presents the National Humanities Medal to Philip Roth during a ceremony at the White House in Washington.(JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)

Jews! News! Right here! Right now!

Krugman nabs top spot: Paul Krugman won our big smart president’s Fake News Award, revealed just before the site crashed. I like to imagine that he saw this and then swept all the papers and office knick-knacks off his desk, and then stared wistfully at his Nobel Prize.

Day school to host drag queen Havdallah: Lander Grinspoon Academy in Northampton is hosting “a Jewish version of Drag Queen Story Hour, a national program in which drag entertainers read stories to children.” This unabashedly, unequivocally, undeniably, rules.

Benjamin Netanyahu wants BollywoodBibi was “hobnobbing with Bollywood bigwigs” at an event in Mumbai, trying to entice more Indian film producers to shoot in Israel. What I’m envisioning here is a full Netanyahu family cameo in one of those big dance scenes during the credits. Or something like this.

Roth gets real: There are so many highlights from this interview I don’t even know where to start. Trump is an “ominously ridiculous commedia dell’arte figure of the boastful buffoon.” He says that he’s been writing about men who are “aroused, stimulated, hungry in the grip of carnal fervor and facing the array of psychological and ethical quandaries the exigencies of desire present” for so long that nothing about the #MeToo movement surprises him. Please read this.

There are Yiddish ghosts in Phoenix“It started with knickknacks being moved around the house. Then it was kitchen drawers being opened. The haunting experience culminated when Rudy Calderon’s family saw a Yiddish word scrawled on a bathroom wall with what appears to be charcoal.” WHAT COULD BE SCARIER.

Jesse Bernstein is a former Intern at Tablet.