Arts & Culture


Friction Where Heaven Meets Earth

By Jo-Ann Mort

This book of authoritative essays, artwork and photographs is a labor of scholarly love that, through the joint intellectual efforts of Jewish, Muslim and Christian scholars, brings down to earth the heavenly concerns surrounding the Holy Esplanade; 150,000 square meters, holy to three religions for the past three millennia. The very fact of this joint project of scholars from Hebrew University, Al-Quds University — the main Palestinian university in Jerusalem and the West Bank — and the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise de Jerusalem proves that even if the Israelis and Palestinians, or Jews, Muslims and Christians, cannot agree on a shared narrative about this spot, they can all present their disagreements in reasoned, readable, concise prose.Read More

Sundance Ends, Sobered by "A Film Unfinished"

By Stewart Nussbaumer

Sundance filmgoers were stunned and quieted by Yael Hersonski’s “A Film Unfinished” which assembled a documentary around an hour of footage staged by the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto on the eve of its liquidation.Read More

Afropoptastic

By Mordechai Shinefield

In 1985, after wearing out a cassette of the Boyoyo Boys’ song “Gumboots,” Jewish singer/songwriter Paul Simon flew to South Africa to record “Graceland.” Nowadays, magnetic tape may seem antiquated, but 25 years later, American Jewish artists are still drawing heavily on African popular music. Afropop, encompassing genres as varied as the Afrobeat pioneered in Nigeria by Fela Kuti and the Mbaqanga of South Africa, which moved Paul Simon, inspires an array of American Jewish music composed of a multitude of different genres and styles.Read More

Failing in the Golden Land

By Jenna Weissman Joselit

Recently, Philadelphia’s National Museum of American Jewish History announced the creation of a Jewish Hall of Fame, inviting nominations from the public at large. Not surprisingly, those who received the nod and will eventually inhabit this hallowed roster of notables consist of the usual suspects: Irving Berlin and Barbra Streisand, Louis Brandeis and Albert Einstein. There’s not a clunker among them. Drawn from the arts and the business world, from the groves of academe and the halls of power, they’re all glaring successes, proof positive of the unbridled bounty and promise of America.Read More

Poetry in a Time of Revolution

By Marci Shore

By early 1917, the Russian Empire was going up in flames. In the dark and cold Petrograd winter, bread shortages and other bitter wartime conditions resulted in demonstrations, strikes and mutiny by Tsar Nicholas II’s troops. That February, the tsar abdicated his throne. He was replaced by the highly unstable “Dual Power” — a joint rule of a liberal Provisional Government and a socialist Petrograd Soviet. This was the February Revolution, and it marked the start of an explosive moment of cultural history illuminated in Kenneth Moss’s brilliant new book, “Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution.”Read More

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