Benjamin Balint
By Benjamin Balint
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Culture From Frankfurt to New Haven
A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe By Geoffrey Hartman Fordham University Press, 160 pages, $24.95. Memoirs of displacement often trace shadows cast by the world departed onto the world gained. In his new autobiography, literary theorist Geoffrey Hartman outlines in just this way the lasting effects on his life of…
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Culture Hannah Arendt, 100 Years Later
Islamic terrorism is the new totalitarianism. At least that’s the impression one gets from some Western commentators these days. In “Terror and Liberalism,” Paul Berman invoked totalitarianism in order to explain the strikingly modern ideology of Islamism. Joschka Fischer, then Germany’s foreign minister, spoke of a “third totalitarianism.” This past February, Salman Rushdie, Bernard-Henri Lévy…
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Culture Rediscovering Isaac Rosenfeld
This week’s 50th yahrzeit of Isaac Rosenfeld, a brilliant and unjustly forgotten writer who belonged to a brilliant moment in American Jewish writing, offers a good occasion to measure the distance between that moment and our own. Rosenfeld’s story is a strange amalgam of success and failure. Born in Chicago, Rosenfeld was a prodigy, at…
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Culture A Novelist Defends Zion’s Idealists
Mandrakes From the Holy Land By Aharon Megged Translated by Sondra Silverston Toby Press, 220 pages, $22.95. * * *| In an impassioned 1994 article in Ha’aretz, Aharon Megged, one of Israel’s most accomplished novelists, suddenly permitted himself to address in his own voice the disdain with which many of his colleagues are given to…
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Culture Ozick Returns, Still Aflush With Ideas
Heir to the Glimmering World By Cynthia Ozick Houghton Mifflin, 310 pages, $25. * * *| Cynthia Ozick, the fiercely and fearsomely intelligent critic and novelist, has based her latest work of fiction on Winnie-the-Pooh. More precisely, the new book is inspired by the story of Christopher Robin Milne (1920-1996), whose father, A.A. Milne, wrote…
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News The Art of Tempting Memory To Speak
Feathers By Haim Be’er Translated by Hillel Halkin Brandeis University Press, 272 pages, $26. * * *| The Pure Element of Time By Haim Be’er Translated by Barbara Harshav Brandeis, 282 pages, $26. * * *| What are the common elements of memory and art? How is remembrance, with its duty to veracity, fashioned into…
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News Capturing the Meanderings of Memory
Benjamin Balint is the assistant editor of Commentary magazine. The Hooligan’s Return: A Memoir By Norman Manea Translated by Angela Jianu Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 385 pages, $30. * * *| In one of Norman Manea’s novellas, “The Interrogation,” the main character, a young woman imprisoned in an unnamed place for an unnamed political crime,…
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News ‘There Are More Things in Heaven’
Pushing Time Away: My Grandfather And the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna By Peter Singer Ecco/HarperCollins, 272 pages, $24.95. * * *| Ever since his “Animal Liberation” hit the best-seller lists in 1975, Peter Singer, the Australian-born philosopher and recently appointed professor of bioethics at Princeton University, has been notorious for his radical views in support…
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