Austin Ratner
By Austin Ratner
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Culture How tales of Jewish resistance inspire a 21st Century Nazi hunter
“The madness of the brave moves the world forward,” Chaika Grossman said when she was fighting Nazis in the Polish ghettos. She had a ticket out of Poland in 1938 but chose to stay behind and lead the resistance in her hometown of Bialystok. The Nazis entered the city and punished it at the height…
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Culture How Judd Legum accomplished what millions couldn’t
The famous story goes that in the 1970s, while teaching political science at the University of Louisville, Mitch McConnell made a chalkboard list of three requirements for success in politics: money, money and money. His critics therefore rejoiced when companies began pledging to withhold their money from Republicans who voted to overturn the presidential election….
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Culture EXCLUSIVE: An Interview With Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet Greg Pardlo
Nobody ever said a Trump presidency would be poetic, and it isn’t. From midnight tweets full of babyish interjections, to a press secretary who sometimes sounds like he’s reading a Ouija board, the English language has in a few short months taken a beating — much harsher, remarkably, than the one George W. Bush gave…
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Opinion How Donald Trump Uses Anti-Semitic Rhetoric Against Hillary Clinton (Even Though She’s Not Jewish)
Over the summer, a writer for the “alt-right” website Breitbart News called Hillary Clinton a communist. What’s striking about the accusation is certainly not its source, nor its target, and definitely not its content. What’s striking is that the article appeared side by side with a web advertisement for Stephen Bannon’s film “Clinton Cash.” The…
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Food Honoring My Father With a ‘Bastard’ Scotch
Drinking in Scotland relieved me of some of my aversion to peaty whiskeys. It changed my associations of that smoky flavor from cadavers to Scottish glens. We were on vacation, staying at the Balmoral Hotel (where J.K. Rowling finished writing Harry Potter) and I was paging through the massive binder detailing their whiskies in the…
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Culture LeBron James Has Changed Our Lives — but Not Our Cleveland Jewish Identity
After the Cleveland Cavaliers made history Sunday night, becoming the first basketball team in the history of the NBA Finals to come back from a 3-1 deficit and win a title against the arrogant, formerly untouchable Golden State Warriors, my wife asked me if the victory would be in any way hard to swallow, given…
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Opinion Did Israel Prepare Coach David Blatt To Handle ‘King’ LeBron James?
Many of the logos belonging to the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team feature a sword: in one case a flag with a ‘C’ on it flies from the sword, and in two others the sword slides through the Cleveland ‘C’ as if into a scabbard. But the warlike images could go the other way. The sword…
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Culture A Cleveland Son’s Debt to Anny Katan and Sigmund Freud
Anny Katan learned psychoanalysis at Sigmund Freud’s knee — on his lap, in fact! “I grew up often literally sitting on Freud’s lap when I was very little,” Katan explained in a 1986 interview, reminiscing about her childhood in Vienna. Her personal history, intertwined as it was with the origins of psychoanalysis and with the…
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