David Kaufmann
By David Kaufmann
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Culture The Silver Age of Rock and Roll
Call it the “Mad Men” syndrome: These days, we’re nostalgic for other people’s youth. The symptoms present themselves most clearly when it comes to music. Since the world went digital, the recording industry has spent a lot of time in the vaults, coming up with packages that are meant to appeal to the completist in…
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Culture Talented Life of Diane Arbus Reconsidered
An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus By William Todd Schultz Bloomsbury, 256 pages, $25 Although William Todd Schultz reminds his readers that photographer Diane Arbus remains something of a mystery, he promises that his new psychobiography, “An Emergency in Slow Motion,” will provide the needed password. It will unlock secrets….
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Culture ‘After Weegee’ Defends Photojournalism
After Weegee: Essays on Contemporary Jewish American Photographers By Daniel Morris Syracuse University Press, 320 pages, $29.95 More than a decade ago, William Klein claimed that there are two kinds of photographers: “Jewish and goyish.” He said that if you look at modern photography, you find, “on the one hand, the Weegees, the Diane Arbuses,…
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Culture Channeling the Power of Memory
Judaism Musical and Unmusical By Michael P. Steinberg *University of Chicago Press, 270 pages. $21. * When Michael Meyer published his classic book, “The Origins of the Modern Jew,” more than 40 years ago, that Jew turned out to be German. Because of the fitful and disastrously unsuccessful nature of Jewish emancipation, German Jews confronted…
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Culture The Reciprocal Antagonist
The Silver Jews — one of the most durable indie bands of the early 1990s — have a problem with their name. When the band’s founder, David Berman, came up with it, he didn’t know what it meant, so he fabricated all sorts of stories to explain it. While Europeans want to talk about the…
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Culture The Playless Play’s the Thing
Dan Fishback — a 27-year-old performance artist, musician, and recent winner of a significant grant — isn’t surprised when Jews reject him. After all, he is unabashedly gay, resolutely Jewish, strongly critical of Israeli policies and firmly against the Iraq War. His work presses a lot of buttons. He is also not surprised when he’s…
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Culture Marvel’s Mavens
Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero By Danny Fingeroth Continuum, 183 pages, $24.95. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America By David Hajdu Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 448 pages, $26. The history of comics has been big recently, and there’ve been a number of…
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Culture O, Landsman, Where Art Thou?
First there was bluegrass, then there was newgrass and now, perhaps inevitably, there is Jewgrass. It’s not yet a trend. Call it a development. You can find it in New York, Denver and suburban Washington, D.C. It’s still rare enough to sound like a high-concept gag — Jed Clampett in a tallis — but it’s…
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