By Adam Rovner
Jews didn’t flee Europe because of pogroms. They moved to all corners of the world to find economic opportunity, writes Gur Alroey in a new book.
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By Adam Rovner
Israelis barely speak Hebrew. The language on the streets, in cafes and along the beaches is a hybrid of adapted and adopted expressions mined from Arabic, English, Russian, Yiddish and dozens of dialects. When I first arrived in Israel in 1987, I thought the handful of half-remembered words from my few years spent at a yeshiva would help me get around Jerusalem. But I sounded like an autistic teenager from the pages of Genesis. I shouted at a guy hassling a female friend, “
Lech lecha!” thinking this might send him on his way.
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By Adam Rovner
Before Snooki ruled the Jersey Shore, Atlantic City’s reigning boss was Enoch “Nucky” Johnson. HBO’s new television series “Boardwalk Empire,” set in Atlantic City during Prohibition, draws on the true story of Nucky and his Irish, Italian and Jewish partners in crime. Ethnic and racial rivalries melted away in the bathtub stills so long as Nucky controlled the town from his oceanfront suite in the Ritz-Carlton.
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By Adam Rovner
Sherriff’s badges weren’t the only Jewish stars in the Wild West. Consider gunslinger Jim Levy, Deadwood mayor Sol Star, Jewish Pueblo Indian chief Solomon Bibo, blue jeans inventor Levi Strauss and David May, the merchant who built his trading post into a chain of national department stores now controlled by Macy’s. Even O.K. Corral gunfighter Wyatt Earp is buried in a Jewish cemetery, but only because of his Jewish wife, Josephine Sophie Marcus. But there are no Yiddish cowboys in the newest blockbuster video game from Rockstar Games, the three-act horse opera “Red Dead Redemption.” Rockstar’s revisionist history of how the West was won turns Jews into America’s losers.
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By Adam Rovner
Russian-born Israeli author Alex Epstein, 39, hunches forward across the table at the bar. He brushes his long hair out of his face. He scratches his beard. He adjusts his glasses. Epstein’s nervous hands want a cigarette. But at this upscale Denver bar, smoking is off-limits. He has to make do with a glass of wine. Our waitress asks if he wants a “small” glass or a “big” glass. He shrugs, raises his eyebrows and says he has never heard of a “big” glass of wine. This is America, the waitress reminds us: Everything is king-sized. But size doesn’t matter to Epstein, a master of flash-fiction who distills stories to their aphoristic essence. Epstein, the Schusterman Family Foundation’s visiting writer-in-residence at the University of Denver, has recently published his first English collection, “Blue Has No South” (Clockroot Books). He spoke with the Forward’s Adam Rovner.
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