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The Two Fagins

Comment of the Week

by
Marc Tracy
February 24, 2012
(Ravi Joshi/Tablet Magazine)
(Ravi Joshi/Tablet Magazine)

Winner gets a free Nextbook Press book appropriate to his or her comment (if he or she emails me at [email protected] with his or her mailing address).

This week’s winner is “Ellen,” who relayed, upon reading Allen Ellenzweig’s essay on representations of Jews in British literature, “On a related note, this is why I could never finish reading Oliver Twist but I love the movie Oliver! because Fagin is the coolest, most nuanced character in the whole work.”

Ellen gets a copy of Esther Schor’s Emma Lazarus, the biography of the poet made famous by the Statue of Liberty, because Ellen recognizes that bad things tend to get better once they dock in America’s harbors.

Likeness of a Jew [Tablet Magazine]
Emma Lazarus [Nextbook Press]

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.