Adam Rovner is Associate Professor of English and Jewish Literature at the University of Denver and the author of In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands before Israel (NYU 2014).
Adam Rovner
By Adam Rovner
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Culture A Carnival Ride Reimagining Of The Book Of Jeremiah
Muck: A Novel Dror Burstein Translated from the Hebrew by Gabriel Levin Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pages, $27 Prophets don’t really see the future. What they see all too clearly is the present. That’s why prophecy is a lonely, thankless job. Think about the fate of the biblical Jeremiah. For about 40 years, he…
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Film & TV In A Predominantly Christian Country, Why Is Jewish Humor So Popular?
Jewish Comedy: A Serious History By Jeremy Dauber W. W. Norton & Company, 416 pages, $28.95 Jews are hilarious. We know this, or at least think we do. Just look at all the Jewish cut-ups out there. At the moment, Judd Apatow, Jenji Kohan, Amy Schumer and Sarah Silverman are some of the top performers…
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49 Reasons Why 2016 Wasn't as Bad as You Think Shipbreaking
Lines and line breaks are poetry’s structural units, in much the same way that timbered planks — and the gaps that must be filled between them — create a ship’s hull. Fittingly, the rapturous poems in Robin Beth Schaer’s “Shipbreaking” are fashioned from taut lines joined by tension. Nautical imagery of wind, waves and wreck…
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Community Why Jewish Responses to Trump Make My Job as a Professor So Much Harder
I know your children. I do. After they’ve gone off to college and decided to seek out some Jewish connection, they find their way to my Hebrew literature courses. When they’re trying to understand Israel’s national narrative, they sit expectantly in my classroom and read about Zionist ideology. Most of my students aren’t Jewish, and…
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Culture When Jewish Colonists Prospected for Utopia in Colorado
Imagine a windswept mountain town dotted with tar paper shacks. An unscrupulous mine owner twirls his moustache as he surveys the scene. Nearby, a one-eyed farmer and his fallen bride battle the rocky soil of their ramshackle homestead. Half-starved Indians skulk in the town’s shadows. Meanwhile, priceless cargo winds its way by train and wagon…
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The Schmooze My Brush With Herzl’s Beard
Just think of Theodor Herzl and what do you see? A long, lush, black beard. There it is on Herzl’s prophetic profile staring out from the hotel balcony in Basel pointing Zion-ward. There it is again groomed in three-quarter portrait, a flowing beard fit for a modern day Moses. No better icon of the Zionist…
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Opinion When Christians Fight Over Israel
Choir members at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Florida / Getty Images When Christians fight, Jews are collateral damage. The prize is Israel, or at least how Americans perceive Israel. That’s one lesson to take away from the Presbyterian Church-USA’s (PC-USA) decision on June 20 to divest from three companies that profit from Israel’s…
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Culture How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Vladimir Jabotinsky
Jabotinsky: A Life By Hillel Halkin Yale University Press, 256 pages, $25 Hillel Halkin’s new biography, “Jabotinsky: A Life,” features as its frontispiece a 1918 photograph of the activist and author in his British military uniform. It’s an excellent choice of illustration that captures several of the paradoxes of his character. The baby-faced infantry officer…
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Art This Jewish artist hadn’t painted in more than 5 decades. Then came Oct. 7.
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Opinion How can I explain to my 93-year-old mother why it suddenly seems ok to hate Jews?