Jewish Culture

The writer discusses growing up in the Borscht Belt, the prevalence of literary humor, and the power of feminist punch lines.

Lying on the couch all day glass of water a highly disgusting smoothie four coloring books, / a myriad of psychiatric and “anti-inflammatory” medication / anti-inflammatory Jewish history books / anti-inflammatory pretzel sticks / anti-inflammatory medicinal cannabis

When I arrived in London this past September to meet Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin at their studio, the first thing we discussed was the power play between interviewer and interviewee.

It’s a rare delight when a film makes a little-known, hermetic community that is bristling with traditions, customs, rules, and regulations come alive, transcending that subculture through its humanity.
Gila looked at the photographs and tried to connect them to the man she’d been secretly meeting this past year, but the pictures came from a different order of reality.

Charles Reznikoff (1894–1976) writes prose like a poet, indeed he is one, with his rock-hard choice of words styled into deceptively simple sentences.

Let’s begin with an image Peter Manseau’s character Itsik Malpesh always returns to: a toddler clenching her fist in the air to stop a mob, mid-pogrom.

The Pale of Settlement was once the swath of land designated by Imperial Russia as the only legitimate home of their Jewish population, one they reluctantly inherited after partitioning the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

That dinner party was unforgettable: there was an abundance of very proper and elegant guests, seated in the living room with coffee and desserts, when suddenly the dogs burst in like a gale.
“Götz and Meyer. Having never seen them, I can only imagine them.”

In The Seventh Beggar, Pearl Abraham has created a novel about the nature of storytelling beginning with Genesis. She takes us into a world that ranges from golems to robotics, mystical systems to artificial intelligence.

Both first-rate novelists, Frederic Tuten and Jerome Charyn grew up in the Bronx, meeting as teenagers at the home of Fay Levine, the Bronx’s own Elizabeth Taylor. The two reminisce after the release of Charyn’s novel The Green Lantern.

A neuroradiologist and writer whose father is an Orthodox rabbi, Aryeh Lev Stollman grew up in a home surrounded by both religious and secular books.
My mother died in the middle of the night. In my mind’s eye, I see it like the lights turning off in an old factory, shutting down one circuit bank at a time, an electric hum the only thing remaining.
This First Proof contains the poems “Jerusalem,” “The Sirens,” and “Greetings from Angelus (Paul Klee Angelus Novus).” Translated by Richard Sieburth.