Joel Streicker
By Joel Streicker
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Culture A Sensitive Finger On the Pulse of Politics
Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics By David Grossman, translated by Jessica Cohen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 144 pages. $18.00. In the wake of the Israeli elections and their policy ramifications, reading this essay collection, which is composed mostly of material written in the past couple of years, occasioned a certain vertigo:…
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Culture Not Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos
Three Balconies: Stories and a Novella By Bruce Jay Friedman *Biblioasis, 203 pages, $24.95. * Beginning in the 1960s, Bruce Jay Friedman’s literary star burned hot and bright — acclaimed novels, plays, short stories, screenplays — only to dim after his screenplay for “Splash” was nominated for an Oscar 25 years ago. Although “Even the…
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Culture No More Shoah, Let’s Build A New Israel
The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes By Avraham Burg, translated by Israel Amrani *Palgrave Macmillan, 272 pages, $26.95. * Avraham Burg’s new book, “The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes,” is maddening: It is by turns incisive and hard-hitting, but also bombastic, vague and repetitious. It is also…
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Culture Man in Search Of Language
Readers expecting a grand symphony on how Hebrew was revived as a living language beginning in the late 19th century will be disappointed by Ilan Stavans’s “Resurrecting Hebrew.” The book deals more with Stavans’s own re-encounter with the language and its meaning for his life than with the creation of modern Hebrew in the late…
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Culture Family: A Self-Portrait
I Am My Family: Photographic Memories and Fictions By Rafael Goldchain Princeton Architectural Press, 168 pages, $40. There is something unsatisfying about Rafael Goldchain’s faux family photo album, “I Am My Family” — and it is this very quality that accounts for its considerable fascination and power. A photographer who has long explored questions of…
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Culture A Step-by-Step Guide to Peace in Israel
The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at Last By Bernard Avishai Harcourt, 304 pages, $26. The old adage notwithstanding, everyone judges a book by its cover. When the cover features a subtitle that promises to tell us how lasting peace can be achieved for Israel, the skeptical reader…
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Culture Visiting Fidel’s Infidels: Ruth Behar’s Return to the Cuban Home She Never Knew
An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba By Ruth Behar, with photographs by Humberto Mayol Rutgers University Press, 288 pages, $29.95. It is hard to begin a book with a section of “blessings for the dead,” but then it is hard to hail from a community that one never really knew much about. In…
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