How nine fiction writers handled the theme of the seventh day
| 7:00 AM Mar 16, 2010
As she made clear in this week’s Vox Tablet podcast, Judith Shulevitz has, with her new book The Sabbath World, offered us nothing less than a kaleidoscopic picture of the day of rest. Below, with excerpts from eight of today’s leading Jewish fiction writers (and a posthumous entry from I.B. Singer), we offer a ...
I.J. joins I.B. with his own Facebook ‘Appreciation Society’
| 2:06 PM Oct 26, 2009
Among the dwindling ranks of Yiddishists, Isaac Bashevis Singer is not the superstar your Hebrew School teacher would have had you believe. “I. B. Singer wasn’t half as good a writer as I. J. Singer—I. B.’s older brother, Israel Joshua—who had died in 1944,” the experts kvetch, according to a 2004 New Yorker article by ...
A novelist reflects on what it means to be a Jewish writer
| 7:00 AM Aug 6, 2009
It may well happen like this:
You’ll be sitting in the Pain Quotidien café enjoying a cup of hot apple cider. A reporter seated across from you will consult her notepad.
“So, how does it feel to be a Jewish writer?” she’ll ask.
You’ll sip your cider, then say you’ve never thought too hard about that. You’ll offer ...
A reissued novel shines a light on the most neglected Singer sibling
| 7:00 AM Jun 24, 2009
Alongside Isaac Bashevis and Israel Joshua there was a third Singer, Hinde Esther, the oldest of the Orthodox clan that spent its formative years in the Polish shtetls immortalized in Bashevis’s oeuvre. A trailblazer, she was the first in her family to set her ideas down on paper, but her early work is lost and only two novels survive. One of those, Der Sheydim Tants, has just been reissued.
A Coney Island diary
| 12:50 PM Feb 26, 2009
People read about Coney Island to avoid visiting Coney Island. People visit Coney Island to avoid living in Coney Island. And what of the people—like this author—who live in Coney Island? They live in Coney Island to avoid writing about Coney Island. Which does not explain what I’m doing now.
This winter, however, this winter of ...
The final work of a doomed Yiddish novelist
| 1:22 PM May 27, 2008
One day in 1934, Pinchus Kahanovitch, a fifty-one-year-old Ukrainian writer of Yiddish stories, fairy tales, and criticism, decided he did not want to disappear. Within a group of novelists and short story writers that included David Bergelson, Peretz Markish, and Moyshe Kulbak, Kahanovitch had been something of an idol, having published in the great Y.L. ...
Jocheved sets up a snow-cone business
Seventy years after the release of his first book, the bestselling ‘As a Driven Leaf,’ Rabbi Milton Steinberg (posthumously) offers a sophomore effort
Wanted by the authorities, the twins head off to the Promised Land
On the eve of the Oscars, an endorsement of ‘The White Ribbon’
A new documentary discusses the legacy of a Nazi filmmaker with his heirs
The anti-‘Edge of Darkness’ email your relatives are forwarding
There are more similarities between Jewish music and Jewish food than meets the ear
At 86, blind and housebound, Fugs frontman Tuli Kupferberg is still dispensing crass words of wisdom
Two bands cultivate the ‘Afro-Judaic’ aesthetic
Making the web’s greatest Hanukkah film
The Fox cult hit ‘Glee’ is about outcasts and Broadway—so naturally it offers a Jewish storyline
Wallace Shawn on being Jewish—onscreen and off
William Kentridge and the art of righting history’s wrongs
At 50, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Beth Sholom synagogue still glimmers—leaks and all
While trying on new artistic hat, artist develops series of paper coats
How Russian-Jewish émigrés are changing the face of competitive ballroom dance
How a latter-day vaudevillian from Kansas City got himself to speak perfect Yiddish
As it progressed, the playwright’s autobiographical trilogy grew more dark—and more true
