Austin Ratner
By Austin Ratner
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Culture New York Exhibit on Children’s Books Highlights Many Jewish Contributions
‘It’s a pattern really. So many of the progressive writers and illustrators of children’s books were Jews,” says Leonard Marcus, who does not usually concern himself with the old parlor game of counting famous Jews. Marcus is curator of the New York Public Library’s exhibit on children’s literature, “The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books…
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Culture Getting Schooled in Poetry by Robert Pinsky
● Singing School: Learning To Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying With the Masters By Robert Pinsky W.W. Norton & Company, 240 page, $25.95 In approaching Robert Pinsky’s new book on how to write poetry, unsuspecting students may be eager for trade secrets, but it will shortly dawn on them that Pinsky has a different…
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Culture Passover, the Warsaw Ghetto, Sigmund Freud, and the Psychology of Bigotry
Even as it was happening, some appear to have understood the Holocaust as a new chapter in the old biblical story of the Exodus: The uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto began, history books tell us, on Passover eve, April 1943. The Passover holiday has certainly apprehended that history in hindsight. In their meditations on the…
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The Schmooze A Novel About Early Childhood
Earlier this week, Sami Rohr Prize winner Austin Ratner discussed the land of the living versus the land of “The Princess Bride.” His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit: Some academics have…
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The Schmooze My Name Is Inigo Montoya
Austin Ratner won the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for his first novel, “The Jump Artist.” His new novel, “In the Land of the Living,” is now available. His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information…
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Opinion Pitting Family Against Politics in Ohio
I’ll forever remember Gene Wilder in the 1979 movie “The Frisco Kid.” He plays a Polish rabbi newly arrived in America in the days of the Wild West. In the first scene, he sees some Mennonite farmers dressed as he is, in black hats, and, overjoyed and relieved, he mistakenly calls out: “Landsman!” The grown-ups…
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Culture Hey, Mr. Banana Man
The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King By Rich Cohen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 288 pages, $27 The cover of Rich Cohen’s engrossing tale of the life of Sam Zemurray shows a banana sprouting from Zemurray’s head like a big curved penis. If you accept that analogy, then…
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News Cleveland Rocks — Not Really
They say geography is destiny. The hills of Greece, according to some historians, encouraged the locals to carve them into city-states. England, “bound in with the triumphant sea,” as Shakespeare put it, inherited the oceans. The Jews were born to a desert land besieged by mortal enemies and afflicted with drought and famine, and then…
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