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Summer Reading
Today on Tablet
Blake Eskin’s brief discussion of the Russian Jewish novelist Vasily Grossman’s epic Life and Fate and how it “draws parallels between fascism and Communism and the use of mass deportation, forced labor, and murder in both totalitarian regimes,” brought to mind Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, which books critic Adam Kirsch reviewed last week and which treats all the mass Nazi and Soviet killings from eastern Germany to western Russia between 1933 and 1945 as worthy of a single study.
It sounds like chilling stuff. “Never read Dostoevsky in winter,” Eskin advises, and Life and Fate may fall into the same category. But Eskin’s introduction and interview with Robert Chandler, Grossman’s foremost English translator, will tide you over until it is spring, or at least until you get your hands on Grossman’s shorter, more weather-appropriate works.
When General Grant Expelled the Jews
Greased, Frightening
John Travolta’s massages, ‘homosexual Jewish men’ in Hollywood, and the true nature of prejudice
Voices Raised for Jerusalem
The Zamir Chorale brings its Jewish choral music to Jazz at Lincoln Center in celebration of Yom Yerushalayim
Old Jews Telling More Jokes
The web series ‘Old Jews Telling Jokes’ goes off-Broadway, with shtick, songs, and a script by writer Daniel Okrent
The Most Perfect Hebrew Bible
The medieval Aleppo Codex was safeguarded for centuries in Syria. The problems started when it arrived in Israel.
