Inevitably, however, we tend to create a generic Holocaust narrative out of the tales we hear most often, and find most easy to identify with. As Americans, we respond to stories of assimilated Western European Jews who are gradually shut out of their country’s life, like that of the German diarist Victor Klemperer. As city dwellers, our imaginations are compelled by Anne Frank’s experience of hiding out in a crowded apartment, invisible in the multitude. And as members of an advanced industrial society, we are compelled by the image of the gas chamber, which writers since Hannah Arendt have made the central emblem of the Holocaust—the ultimate reduction of human life to inanimate matter.

All of these are truths about the Holocaust, but they are not the only truths. As many Jews died by simple shooting as in gas chambers; far more died in Eastern Europe than in Western Europe; millions were killed almost as soon as their towns and villages were occupied by the Germans, with no chance to hide out or adjust in any way to life under Nazism. Statistically speaking, the representative Holocaust story might not feature concentration camps or hiding places or repressive laws at all; it might simply be the story of waking up one morning to find German tanks in your street and a month later being shot and buried in a mass grave. It might sound like this:

People carry on, Vitya, as though their whole life lies ahead of them. It’s impossible to say whether that’s wise or foolish—it’s just the way people are. I do the same myself. There are two women here from a shtetl and they tell the same story as my friend did. The Germans are killing all the Jews in the district, children and old men included. The Germans and Ukrainian police drive up and recruit a few dozen men for field-work. These men are set to dig ditches and two or three days later the Jewish population is marched to these ditches and shot. Jewish burial mounds are rising up in all the villages round about. …

Our turn will come in a week or two, according to plan. But just imagine—I still go on seeing patients and saying, “Now bathe your eye regularly with the lotion and it will be better in two or three weeks.” I’m taking care of one old man whose cataract it will be possible to remove in six months or a year. … Meanwhile the Germans burst into people’s houses and steal; sentries amuse themselves by shooting children from behind the barbed wire; and more and more people confirm that any day now our fate will be decided.

This is the voice of Anna Semyonovna Shtrum, writing her last letter to her son Viktor, in Vasily Grossman’s epic novel Life and Fate. Anna’s letter takes up a whole chapter of the novel, and it haunts the 800-page book just as it haunts Viktor, a Soviet nuclear physicist who is one of its half-dozen main characters. Viktor lives in Moscow, which never fell to the German Army, so he and his family survive the war. If only Viktor had allowed his mother to come and live with him, she would have survived; but his wife, Lyudmila, didn’t get along with Anna, so she remained in Berdichev and died. It’s a situation Grossman could have invented out of sheer authorial sadism, in order to burden Viktor Shtrum with the maximum amount of guilt—except that it was Grossman’s own story. Grossman’s mother never had a chance to smuggle a letter out of Berdichev before she died, so the son invented one for her, setting down the grief and guilt that defined his postwar life:

But my fate is to end my life alone, never having shared it with you. Sometimes I’ve thought that I ought not to live far away from you, that I love you too much, that love gives me the right to be with you in my old age. And at other times I’ve thought that I ought not to live together with you, that I love you too much. Well, enfin, Always be happy with those you love, those around you, those who have become closer to you than your mother. Forgive me.

Continue reading: The Jewishness of Soviet citizens

Lucas is right, of course. In the 1950s, getting the scoop on someone like Noel Field, an American Communist who played a leading role in the Stalinist show trials in postwar Czechoslovakia, would have made a journalist’s career and maybe even changed world history. Fifty years later, Field’s name is known only to a handful of academics and ideologues—the same tiny but committed group who continue to debate the guilt of the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss.

For the same reason, the potency of cutting-edge, politically informed spy fiction tends to weaken over time. John Buchan’s novels about Anglo-German rivalry before World War I, or John le Carré’s Smiley tales, were read on first publication as bulletins from the front of an ongoing battle; today, they offer the quainter pleasures of genre fiction. Stone’s gamble in Damascus Gate was that a spy novel set in Jerusalem would be different. That is because, as many characters in the book have occasion to muse, Jerusalem itself is different. “Other cities had antiquities,” Stone writes, “but the monuments of Jerusalem did not belong to the past. They were of the moment and even the future.” The rivalry between the United States and the USSR lasted 44 years, but the contest between Jews, Christians, and Muslims for physical and spiritual ownership of Jerusalem is still going strong after millennia.

It stands to reason, then, that the new paperback edition of Damascus Gate (Mariner, $15.95) should be as timely as the original. In fact, the identity of past and present is the key doctrine of the religious cult at the novel’s heart. The leader of this cult is Adam de Kuff, a middle-aged American Jew turned spiritual seeker, who we first see waiting in a psychiatrist’s office. He is, Stone makes clear, a schizophrenic and manic-depressive, prey to the delusion that he is the Messiah. Such delusions are common enough in Jerusalem; indeed, the novel opens with Lucas encountering a deranged German tourist in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

What sets de Kuff above such garden-variety lunatics—in Arabic, Stone writes, they are called majnoon—is his partnership with Raziel Melker. Melker, who was born Ralph, is another American Jewish seeker, the son of a congressman who has been by turns a yeshiva student, a jazz musician, a drug addict, and a Sufi master. Stone leaves it deliberately ambiguous whether Melker actually believes that de Kuff is the Messiah or is just preying on a madman for his own hidden purposes, or some combination of both.

In any case, Raziel acts as the Saint Paul to de Kuff’s Jesus, building a cult around him and formulating a new, syncretic theology. “They talked about Zen and Theravada and the Holy Ghost, the bodhisattvas, the sefirot and the Trinity, Pico della Mirandola, Teresa of Avila,” and on and on, Stone writes, in a passage whose bop Ginsbergian rhythms remind us that he is essentially a product of the 1960s. (“You’re one crazy mixed-up chick, baby,” Raziel says at one point.) And there is a genial ’60s-ish eclecticism, not to say fogginess, about the de Kuff cult. He declares himself to be at once the Jewish Moshiach, the Second Coming of Christ, and the Muslim Mahdi: “So as the Almighty is One, so also are the believers,” he explains. The cult’s emblem is the ourobouros, the Greek image of a serpent swallowing its tail: It is meant to symbolize the unity of all times and all ways of worshiping God.

It was on the road to Damascus, of course, that Saul had the epiphany that led him to embrace Christianity and change his name to Paul. The title of Damascus Gate alludes to that conversion, and one of the novel’s main themes is appeal of faith to the nonbeliever. Christopher Lucas, as a journalist, an American, and an earnest liberal, holds himself immune to the blind faiths and sectarian loyalties that determine Jerusalem’s history. (“In the United States people are what they choose to be,” says a minor character in the novel. “It’s not that way here, unfortunately.”) Yet Lucas is also half-Jewish, and he was sent to Catholic school by his mother; the impulse to believe is vestigial in him, and the de Kuff cult makes him at least nostalgic for faith. “He could not resist the little flutter of mindless hope,” Stone writes. “In what? In nothing he could remotely conceive.” On a more worldly level, he is drawn to the cult by his passion for Sonia Barnes, a half-black, half-Jewish jazz singer who succumbs to Raziel’s persuasion.

But if Lucas can’t bring himself to believe, he is surrounded by people who are dangerously convinced. Like a detective in a film noir, he gradually unearths an ever-ramifying conspiracy: a plot to blow up the Temple Mount, in order to clear the way for the construction of the Third Temple. It becomes clear that Raziel has set up Adam de Kuff as the fall guy for this plot, whose real movers are a combination of hard-right Jewish settlers and messianic American Christians. Along the way, Stone spins a dense web of connections and betrayals: Lucas encounters a gun-running Irish NGO worker, and a Palestinian Communist doctor, and a fascistic British archeologist, and a close-mouthed American diplomat, and many more. In the novel’s frenetic last hundred pages, Lucas and a handful of other characters race to a chamber under the Temple Mount, where some are planning to detonate a bomb and others hope to stop it—and it remains unclear, until the very end, exactly who is on which side.

Damascus Gate’s combination of abstruse theological speculation (Stone clearly researched the Kabbalah) and screen-ready action sequences won it a lot of praise when it appeared in 1998. Taken together, they made the novel a good match for its pre-millennial moment, when old fears about the end of the world were taking new forms, and readers responded in kind: To Annie Dillard, for instance, Damascus Gate was “a narrative of good and evil written in letters of fire.”

Certainly no one could say that Jerusalem has calmed down in the last 13 years, or that the religious passions in the city have stopped being explosive. Indeed, just two years after Damascus Gate appeared, Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount helped to set off the so-called “al-Aqsa Intifada,” named after the mosque that Stone’s fictional terrorists hoped to blow up.

Yet that event also helps to show how Damascus Gate misunderstands the very passions it means to analyze. To Stone, the danger of religion is that it is apocalyptic: At the core of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, he argues, is a belief that the world as we know it will someday end, to be replaced by something infinitely better. The most religious people, in Stone’s novel, are those who take this promise seriously and try to hasten the Messiah’s arrival. “We change, we fail,” Raziel tells Lucas, “but the Torah remains, never changes under its garment. The chance to restore tikkun comes again and again.”

Because this dynamic is common to all faiths, Stone suggests, it can best be embodied in a movement like the de Kuff cult, which is post-sectarian and even New Agey in its blending of religious symbols. This licenses the biggest and, at times, most ludicrous failure of realism in Damascus Gate: the fact that its messianic plotters are not mullahs or Lubavitchers but hipsters. Raziel and Sonja are both jazz musicians and ex-druggies, and when they’re not planning the end of the world they jam at a Russian-owned club in Tel Aviv. Even the minor characters in the novel are generally cool and sexy—from Nuala Rice, the seductive Irish leftist who ends up dangling from a noose, to Janusz Zimmer, the aging womanizer and ex-Communist who seems to be masterminding the Temple plot.

Surprisingly, however, in this novel about Jerusalem, none of the main characters is Israeli or Palestinian. At one point Lucas refers to himself as being “in country,” and this foreign-correspondent’s or aid-worker’s phrase sums up the relationship of Stone’s American protagonists to Jerusalem and its inhabitants: They are sources, interlocutors, or obstacles, but seldom peers. This distance allows Damascus Gate to maintain a certain grim neutrality about the Arab-Jewish conflict. The Israeli soldiers we see in the novel are habitually brutal, and one of them—a mysterious figure who operates under the nom de guerre Abu Baraka—leads a vigilante gang in random attacks on Palestinians.

Yet these characters are at least individualized, and Stone balances them with other Jewish Israelis who are benevolent, such as the human-rights worker Ernest Gross and the worldly psychiatrist Dr. Obermann. Palestinians, on the other hand, appear most forcefully in Damascus Gate in the form of superstitious, murderous mobs: Two of the novel’s most powerful scenes involve Lucas fleeing for his life from Arab crowds chanting, “Kill the Jews.” Lucas seems to speak for the novel as a whole when he says that the Israelis, for all their flaws, are “people more like me, in the end. They may not be Knights of the Round Table, but they won’t kill me for being a Jew. Or a djinn.”

To really come to grips with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, would take a novelist more interested in history and less interested in apocalyptic mysticism. After all, when Ariel Sharon went to the Temple Mount in 2000, it was not in an attempt to hasten the End Times, but as a way of claiming sovereignty over territory and signaling his intentions to the Israeli public; that is, his motives were political. So were the motives of the Palestinians who responded with massive violence and suicide bombings. And the militant zealots among Jewish settlers and Palestinian Muslims are not in search of some tantalizing new spiritual insight, like Raziel’s synthesis of Sufism and Buddhism and Judaism; they do not stand for hybridity but for purity and tradition. A fundamentalist is someone who is exactly what he says he is. And that makes fundamentalism a terrible subject for a spy novel, where the narrative suspense comes from the reader’s uncertainty about whether anyone is what he claims to be.

Damascus Gate fails as a book about Jerusalem, one might say, because it is too interesting—more interesting than the city it aims to describe, or else interesting in the wrong way. The best antidote to its fever-dream is to open a book like Zeruya Shalev’s Thera, an Israeli novel in which Jerusalemites get divorced and raise children and argue and suffer, just as people do all over the world. Or, for that matter, to open the newspaper and read about how tens of thousands of Israelis are taking to the streets of Jerusalem—not to build the Third Temple, but to protest the high cost of housing. These are the kinds of human stories that keep getting told in novels, long after the flashy conspiracies are forgotten.

This week’s winner is “Roy,” who, musing on books critic Adam Kirsch’s review-cum-profile of French ballet impresario René Blum and the fact that Blum was the younger brother of the great wartime prime minister Léon, observed, “I find it extraordinary that in the milieu of early twentieth-century century French politics leaders could spring from families of intellectuals. Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré’s cousin was the legendary mathematician Henri Poincaré. Somehow I can’t imagine that happening in the U.S. these days.” (I have pedantically added the accents aigus.)

Roy receives a copy of Nextbook Press’s Benjamin Disraeli, in whose subject the political leader and the intellectual were joined. Plus, its author is Adam Kirsch.

Ballet Master [Tablet Magazine]
Benjamin Disraeli [Nextbook Press]

This week’s winner is Madeline McGuckin, who commented (on Facebook—yep, that counts too!), apropos Allison Hoffman’s profile of the man behind the group Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin, “WTH? Jews for Palin? That’s like Felons For Judge.” (Bonus points for passing up the chance at even an abbreviated curse word.)

She gets a copy of Adam Kirsch’s biography of Benjamin Disraeli, who in the 19th century somehow made being an archconservative a Semitic matter, joining a club that didn’t want him as a member, refashioning it, and arguably becoming the true godfather of Jewish conservatives (even though he joined the Christians, another club that didn’t want him as a member and that continued to see him—as he saw himself—as a Jew).

Jew for Sarah [Tablet Magazine]
Benjamin Disraeli [Nextbook Press]

This week’s winner is “L Weber.” I wrote a little diatribe in this week’s “Huppah Dreams”: “Kids,” I argued, “if it’s important to you to have your friend marry you and the religion is irrelevant, just get them licensed by the state, or just have a non-religious wedding. No reason to endorse this Universal Life stuff!” “L Weber” responded: “Love, and agree wholeheartedly, with the ‘Kids’ note! Thank you! An Anglican priest … .”

I love the ecumenicism! “L Weber” gets a copy of Adam Kirsch’s biography of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who was born a Jew but baptised into the Anglican Church as a boy, and who later told Queen Victoria, “Your Majesty, you know that in most editions of the Holy Bible there is the Old Testament and then there is the New Testament, and in between the two there is an empty, blank page. I am that blank page.” There can be plenitude in such blankness.

Related: Benjamin Disraeli [Nextbook Press]
Old School [Tablet Magazine]

Wednesday evening saw the Jewish Book Council awarding the 2010 National Jewish Book Awards. Gal Beckerman’s When They Come For Us We’ll Be Gone took top honors: Books critic Adam Kirsch praised it, and Beckerman discussed it on Vox Tablet. Hillel Halkin won best biography for his Nextbook Press tome on Yehuda Halevi. And the evening’s host was our intrepid editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse. Photos here (spoiler: There are lots of Jews).

The National Book Critics Circle Announces Award Winners [NBCC]
Related: In the Rearview [Tablet Magazine]
Self-Made Golem [Tablet Magazine]
Consolation Prize [Tablet Magazine]
Last Exit [Tablet Magazine]
Back in the USSR [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Halkin Wins National Jewish Book Award

This week’s winner, “J Carpenter,” wrote of former White House chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel, now “running” to be mayor of Chicago, “I ran against Rahm in a 5K race last October in Chicago and beat him by over a minute . . . . :?).”

“J Carpenter” gets a copy of Adam Kirsch’s biography of Benjamin Disraeli, another brash Jewish put-down artist, who, when told by his great rival Gladstone that he would “die either by hanging or of some vile disease,” responded: “That all depends, sir, on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress.” Oh, snap.

But Kristol’s beliefs were fundamentally reactionary:

Over the decades covered in The Neoconservative Persuasion, the reader sees Kristol losing patience with liberalism, modern art, the welfare state, blacks and the civil rights movement, feminism, and gay rights. In each case, his initial sympathy or at least respect gives way to a disgusted sense that all these movements have gone too far, until the word liberal itself became a kind of imprecation to Kristol (as it did in American politics generally). By the time he wrote the essay “The Way We Were,” in 1995, he had given in to simple nostalgia: In his childhood, Kristol writes, “the reason there were no ‘troubled’ schools is that ‘trouble’ was not tolerated.”

Mugged by Reality

Prescient

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.

Eyewitness

Devastated

• Speaking of! Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan thinks the U.N. tribunal probing former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s 2005 assassination should postpone its indictments for a year lest its findings lead Hezbollah to be startin’ something. [JPost]

• As of now, Israel’s top strategy vis-à-vis Iran is to convince the United States to take a harder line, not to prepare for its own military action. [Politico]

• Murdoch, Cheney, oil, and Israel: What could possibly go wrong? [Fast Company]

• Tablet Magazine books critic Adam Kirsch considers Günter Grass’s novelistic memoir The Box. [Slate]

• Matisyahu loves Reb Nachman (who is the subject of Rodger Kamenetz’s Nextbook Press book). [New Voices]

• Contributing editor Joan Nathan on young Jews cooking hardcore Ashkenazic dishes. Cholent-chic! [NYT]

So this is why peace is impossible.

Caught on Film

Well, to each his own. It is worth noting Wood’s closing remark, on the novel’s politics, though. Writes Wood:

Formally, The Finkler Question gives voice to a decent Jewish liberalism, in which the question of Israel can be even-handedly debated (Jacobson writes a column for the left-leaning London newspaper the Independent); informally, The Finkler Question is always shading toward the atavistic and reactionary, the constant message being that, just as goys are more goyish than they seem, so Jews are more Jewish than they seem (witness Finkler’s political conversion, from liberal to conservative). Anyone can be an anti-Semite, the author says, but not anyone can be a Jew … .

I … dunno. It is only within the sphere of “decent Jewish liberalism” and a “left-leaning London newspaper” that the “question of Israel can be even-handedly debated”?

The passage is reminiscent of a letter written earlier this year to the New York Times Book Review complaining about Harold Bloom’s review of Anthony Julius’s mammoth history of English anti-Semitism (which Adam Kirsch also reviewed). “If there is more political discussion of [a left-wing nature] in Britain than in America,” the letter-writer argued, “it is not necessarily because the English are so anti-Semitic—or at least, I certainly hope not—but more likely (as [Tony] Judt has pointed out) because most Americans live in almost complete ignorance of the ‘fierce relevance’ of certain political realities and facts.”

The punch line is as predictable as, according to Wood, Jacobson’s are: The letter-writer was James Wood. (“What makes England so intrinsically enlightened?” retorted Leon Wieseltier. “They have The Guardian, I know.”)

Of course, I have a feeling that over at some daily magazine of British life and culture, they are examining this mini-brawl from an entirely different perspective.

Member of the Tribe [The New Yorker]
Letters—The Anti-Semitism Question [NYT Book Review]
The Jewish Question: British Anti-Semitism [NYT Book Review]
Family Business [TNR]
Related: Mirror Images [Tablet Magazine]
Albion’s Shame [Tablet Magazine]
Jewish Funhouse Mirror Is Alive and Not So Well [NYT]
Earlier: Howard Jacobson Pulls Off Man Booker Upset

If you wanted to read something much like the above, only before he won the Booker (as opposed to, say, a week after he did), you could have checked our interview with him, which ran last Monday.

If you now want to read something amazing by Jacobson and haven’t had time to run out to your nearest bookstore and pick up the winning novel, The Finkler Question, you can read his amazing profile of American ping-pong legend Marty Reisman.

And if you want to read an actual review of the Man Booker-winning book … well, unfortunately the Times can’t help you there. But Tablet Magazine books critic Adam Kirsch gave it the full treatment at the beginning of the month. (He hated it. Kidding!)

Booker Prize Winner’s Jewish Question [NYT]
Related: The Plot Against England
Smash [Tablet Magazine]
Mirror Images [Tablet Magazine]

Today, we have an interview with Jacobson, in which he talks about his new novel, his old novel, his country, his people’s country, and his first love—which happens to be ping-pong.

Speaking of! We’re also extremely pleased to publish, for the first time in the United States, Jacobson’s 1999 profile of American table tennis champion Marty Reisman.

As for The Finkler Question itself: Books critic Adam Kirsch sung its merits last week.

Haven’t had your fill? Listen below to hear Jacobson discuss Israel and intone its name many, many times.

Related: The Plot Against England [Tablet Magazine]
Smash [Tablet Magazine]
Mirror Images [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier:Jacobson’s ‘Finkler’ Makes Man Booker Shortlist

That’s not all! Oona King, the daughter of a black father and a Jewish mother, was defeated last week in her bid to be Labour’s nominee for mayor of London. The victor, Ken Livingstone, a former mayor, is not a big fan of Israel! He will face incumbent Boris Johnson, a Tory, who previously unseated him.

And! Susan Kramer, who is running to be president of the Liberal Democrats, is a Jew (the party’s Nick Clegg serves as the deputy prime minister in the coalition government led by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron). A former MP, Kramer lost her London seat earlier this year to Conservative Zac Goldsmith, who, yes.

British politicians: Some of them are Jewish!

New Labour Leader Looks to ‘Middle England’ [NYT]
Ken Livingstone Beats Oona King to Labour Nomination for London Mayor [Guardian]
Related: Labour’s Fraternal Struggle [The Nation]
Benjamin Disraeli [Nextbook Press]
Yes, Minister [Tablet Magazine]

But most intriguing to The Scroll is a reference that comes early in the play. The young protagonist (Robbins) is writing a letter to his hero, the theater legend (Glover), hoping to secure a meeting:

“I read in the paper that you’re going to mount your musical Disraeli this summer in London … I did the show at my high school. I played Ben (in the original keys) and designed the sets … I was also the one who persuaded Mrs. Leach to do it when everyone else wanted to do Bye Bye Birdie.”

We don’t know of any actual musical about Benjamin Disraeli; nor do we know if the Disraeli of the maybe-nonexistent musical or the Disraeli of real life answered to “Ben.” But anyone interested in musicalizing the life of England’s first Jewish prime minister might want to check out the Nextbook Press biography by Tablet Magazine books critic Adam Kirsch.

Related: Benjamin Disraeli [Nextbook Press]
The Old ‘Coming Out’ Story Gets Twisted [Capital]

• “A Zionist Supreme” by Adam Kirsch, September 29, 2009. Kirsch, our books critic, credited Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish U.S. Supreme Court justice, with “la[ying] out the terms of the compact that still governs American Jews’ relations with Israel: they would offer money and moral support, but not sacrifice their Americanness.”

• “Mother May I?” by Eryn Loeb, June 11, 2009. Loeb, a contributing editor, revisits A Treasure for My Daughter, which contains everything a young Jewish woman is supposed to know … in 1950.

• “King Without a Crown” by Allison Hoffman, May 10, 2010. Hoffman, our senior writer, epically profiled Malcolm Hoenlein, one of the most politically influential American Jews.

Do you have other favorites? List ‘em in the comments …

• Über-Jew Harold Bloom tackled Anthony Julius’s new tome on British anti-Semitism.

• As presaged Friday, Tablet Magazine books critic Adam Kirsch struggled with whether we must throw out the baby that is Martin Heidegger’s mainstream philosophical contribution with the bathwater that is his undeniable Nazism.

• Also as presaged Friday, Francine Prose reviewed a new biography of Irène Némirovsky as well a collection of the French-Jewish writer’s newly translated stories.

• And Francis Fukuyama, in the course of an essay on Friedrich Nietzsche, argues that the crazy/brilliant German philosopher transformed from a run-of-the-mill casual anti-Semite to “a principled anti-anti-Semite” and enemy of “German chauvinism.”

And a bonus! In the Week in Review section, film critic A.O. Scott declared that this is the year of Generation X’s midlife crisis in an essay whose central juxtaposition was the new Noah Baumbauch film Greenberg and the new Sam Lipsyte novel The Ask, which both feature similarly schlemiel-like protagonists. Wish we’d thought of that connection. Oh, wait, our very own Marissa Brostoff did.

Related: Look Out! [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Kirsch, Heidegger, and Némirovsky, Oh My!

Kirsch reviewed the correspondence between Heidegger and Hannah Arendt (his lover!) in 2004 for Nextbook.org, Tablet Magazine’s precursor.

Paul La Farge reviewed an earlier Irène Némirovsky biography for Nextbook.org in 2006.

And Francine Prose discussed Anne Frank on a Vox Tablet podcast last year.

This NYT podcast is really good by the way. Not, you know, National Magazine Award-winning good, but good.

Book Review Podcast: Heidegger, Irène Némirovsky and Anti-Semitism [Arts Beat]

Kirsch shares the prize with Marcela Valdes, a writer and editor who specializes in Latin American arts and culture. In her acceptance speech, she shared this insight on her craft: “I believe that all good criticism must begin with a serious attempt at understanding… We can all understand a book and loathe it. But without that first step, criticism slides into egoism—and that is the most vulgar corruption of our art.” We hope to hear a lot more from both talented winners.

Adam Kirsch And Marcela Valdes Win The Center For Fiction’s First Roger Shattuck Prizes For Criticism [booktrade]

UPDATE: Guess what? They are brothers!

Passover FAQ by the Editors
Everything you ever wanted to know about the Feast of Unleavened Bread

Ask, Don’t Tell by Vox Tablet
A father’s reflections on teaching his son the Four Questions

On the Bookshelf by Josh Lambert
Beyond Maxwell House: A haggadah roundup

Monkey Business by Marjorie Ingall
Just in time for Passover, an exhibition devoted to Curious George sheds light on the character’s genesis and his German-Jewish creators’ exodus

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Exodus ’56 by Adam Kirsch
A novel examines the parallel dislocations of Hungarian and Egyptian immigrants to Israel

Crash Course by Patrick Huguenin
Invited to a seder, a non-Jew quickly learns everything he can about making a kosher-for-Passover recipe

Repeat Performances by Dara Horn
What Jewish rituals and Judaism share with Civil War reenactment and Southern culture

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

‘I Lift My Lamp’ by Esther Schor
Including Emma Lazarus in the Passover seder reminds Jews to keep marching toward justice

Passover Pancake by Liel Leibovitz
This Passover, Daniel Boulud is borrowing a food staple from a different holiday

Thursday, March 25, 2010

The Tablet Haggadah
Writers, artists, and a boxer meditate on the meaning of Passover

Paste Test by Joan Nathan
Comparing charosets—the date, nut, and wine concoction that sweetens the seder

Platonic Form by Judith Shulevitz
What makes the seder night different? Its Greek roots.

Friday, March 26, 2010

Piece Meal by Joshua J. Friedman
The first Passover celebrations included neither haggadah nor seder. With the passage of millennia, the two have become central elements. Herewith an interactive guide to the collage of texts that constitutes the holiday’s guidebook.

Dead Wrong by Liel Leibovitz
A haftorah of rigidity and ritual

Everything’s Coming Up Moses by Rachel Shukert
Songs from Tablet Magazine’s ‘Gypsy’-inspired Passover musical

Monday, March 29, 2010

Substitutions by Marjorie Ingall
For a kid-friendly Passover, try rounding out the seder plate with some off-menu additions