A.J. Goldmann is a writer based between Munich and Berlin. His articles about European and Jewish culture have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The Guardian.
A.J. Goldmann
By A.J. Goldmann
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Culture Wagner Festival Confronts Controversial Past
On the occasion of the Bayreuth Festival the Grüner Hügel, or Green Hill, that is home to the Richard-Wagner-Festspielhaus was littered with 500 multicolored “mini-Wagners” — garden-gnomelike figurines of the composer, hands raised as if ready to conduct. These cute statuettes share the hill with an outdoor exhibition, “Silenced Voices,” honoring 53 Jewish singers, musicians…
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News Muslim Clerics Learn Lessons of Auschwitz Firsthand
When Muslims tour Auschwitz and other sites of the Jewish Holocaust, and encounter survivors of that genocide face-to-face, the points of connection they make can be quite unpredictable. For Barakat Fawzi Hasan, a Palestinian assistant professor in Islamic Education at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, a moment of clarity came as he and his co-religionists listened,…
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News Circumcision Controversy Endangers Fight To Keep Rite Legal in Germany
The practice of metzitzah b’peh, a controversial part of some Jewish circumcisions, is reigniting concern about religious circumcision in Germany, where the government only recently fended off an effort to outlaw the ritual altogether. The chief representative of Chabad in Berlin, Rabbi Yehuda Teichtal, has been accused of making MBP, as metzitzah b’peh is often…
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News Polish Museum Set To Open Spectacular Window on Jewish Past
It is a painfully cold day as a light snow falls on the Museum of the History of Polish Jews and on its immediate neighbor, the monument to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Inside the museum, nearly 100 workers are putting the finishing touches on the near-completed building. The undulating walls are painted…
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Culture The Assassination of R.B. Kitaj
‘Jewish cultural life with all its disasters, brilliance, learning, evasions and daring has conducted me and my art like an excited zombie or Golem,” the painter R.B. Kitaj wrote in a commentary to his early painting “The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg,” a stark collagelike canvas named for the Jewish revolutionary leader who was assassinated in…
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News German Circumcision Ruling Raises Outcry
A controversial court ruling in Cologne that effectively prohibits most circumcisions in that city has touched a nerve worldwide, and sparked an outcry in Germany that has united Jews and Muslims in a rare common protest. The judgment, delivered on May 5 but only published on June 26, found that the circumcision of a four-year-old…
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Culture Lou Reed’s Return to Dark Roots
“Lulu,” the unlikely collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica, rapidly went from being one of the year’s most anticipated releases to being the most reviled album of 2011. USA Today called it “arty sludge” and gave it one star. Writing in Grantland, Chuck Klosterman lambasted it as “a successful simulation of how it feels to…
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The Schmooze German University Gets Liturgical Collection
A German University is set to receive an important collection of Jewish liturgical music. The donation of the collection of Robert Singer, a Viennese cantor, will make the University of Augsburg home to one of the main collections of Jewish liturgical manuscripts and recordings in Europe. The acquisition was formally presented June 25 in a…
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