A new biography tries to extinguish the myth of the kinder, gentler Trotsky
| 7:00 AM Nov 24, 2009
When Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City by an agent of Stalin, in 1940, the American novelist James T. Farrell took to the pages of Partisan Review to memorialize him. “The life of Leon Trotsky is one of the great tragic dramas of modern history,” Farrell’s obituary began, and it only gets more idolatrous ...
Woman, born a Soviet Jew, warns of Obama
| 12:29 PM Jul 29, 2009
Stephen Colbert welcomed Orly Taitz onto his Comedy Central show last night. Taitz is the California woman (whom I profiled yesterday for Tablet Magazine) who has become the de facto head of the so-called “birther” movement—the amorphous group of mostly conservative conspiracy theorists who insist, for various and changing reasons, that Barack Obama is not ...
What does Chagall have to do with Russian Yiddish theater?
| 11:23 AM Nov 20, 2008
A sad day has arrived when, in order to attract an audience to an engrossing exhibit about the Yiddish theater, one must claim that the exhibit is about Marc Chagall. That’s exactly what’s happened at New York’s Jewish Museum, where a provocative exhibit, “Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater,” opened last week.
Despite ...
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
