Caracas Retreat
Junketing to South America in the late 1960s with Robert Lowell, a wealthy Venezuelan, and Alfred Kazin. An excerpt from the forthcoming memoir Lucky Bruce.
In the Picture
Bruce Jay Friedman’s darkly comic novels, short stories, and screenplays place him among the past century’s best American writers. In his new memoir, Lucky Bruce, he reminisces about many of them.
On the Bookshelf
Yiddish is far from dead. It’s undead, and it haunts everything from Harvey Pekar’s comics to the vampire literature of the early 20th century.
The Kid Is Back in Town
The remake of The Heartbreak Kid favors bawdiness over sharp-edged satire
Ben-Gurion
Sounding Off
Note to some of my fellow progressives: If we can’t argue about Israel without using anti-Semitic tropes, then the debate is lost before it even begins
Cheap Eats
An entrepreneur opened a Jewish-themed restaurant in Lviv, Ukraine. Chopped liver is on the menu, but not its price—diners get to haggle over it.
Grace Notes
Orthodox klezmer and bluegrass virtuoso Andy Statman and evangelical country star Ricky Skaggs cross genres and faiths to form a mighty duo
Goodbye to All That
For generations, the Jews of Caracas had idyllic weather, prosperity, and vibrant communal organizations. Things have changed under Hugo Chávez.
