David Kaufmann
By David Kaufmann
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Culture A Bohemian Poet Seen in Rare Spotlight
New and Selected Poems By Samuel Menashe, edited by Christopher Ricks Library of America, 191 pages, $20. * * *| Samuel Menashe might well be the most recognized unrecognized American poet of the past 40 years. Although his first book appeared in England in 1961, he was not able to find an American publisher for…
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Culture The Essential Louis Zukofsky
Selected Poems By Louis Zukofsky, edited by Charles Bernstein Library of America, 191 pages, $20. * * *| Louis Zukofsky, born into a pious, Yiddish-speaking household on New York City’s Lower East Side in 1904, seems to have jumped fully formed into American poetry. In 1928, when he was 24, his mentor and intellectual sparring…
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Culture Understanding the Philosopher of Auschwitz
Adorno By Stefan Müller-Doohm; translated by Rodney Livingstone Polity Press, 667 pages, $75. * * *| Adorno: A Political Biography By Lorenz Jäger; translated by Stewart Spencer Yale University Press. 248 pages. $35. * * *| Although Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was one of the two most prominent German philosophers of the postwar period (the other…
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Culture Suffering the Peculiar Fate of Being a Poet’s Poet
The Poems of Charles Reznikoff, 1918-1975 Edited by Seamus Cooney David R. Godine, 400 pages. $21.95. * * *| Charles Reznikoff, who was born to Russian parents in Brooklyn in 1894 and lived the bulk of his life in Manhattan, suffered the peculiar fate of being a poet’s poet: He was well respected and little…
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Culture Not Your Mother’s Neil Diamond
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A hip and really hot music producer seeks out an old and established artist — perhaps a bit past his prime — and talks him into working on an album. The point of the collaboration is to emphasize the singer’s craft and the song itself, and so…
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Culture Not Your Mother’s Neil Diamond
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A hip and really hot music producer seeks out an old and established artist — perhaps a bit past his prime — and talks him into working on an album. The point of the collaboration is to emphasize the singer’s craft and the song itself, and so…
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Culture Narrative History in the Grand Tradition
A History of the Jews in the Modern World By Howard M. Sachar Knopf, 848 pages, $40. * * *| Narrative history is all about plot. At its best, it marshals its facts and then marches them out to tell orderly tales. It cannot really concern itself with complicated social structures because its linear organization…
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Culture Inward Bound: State, Faith and the Jews
The Jewish Prison: A Rebellious Meditation on the State of Judaism By Jean Daniel, translated by Charlotte Mandell Melville House, 214 pages, $14.95. * * *| In “The Jewish Prison: A Rebellious Meditation on the State of Judaism,” an often impassioned, sometimes contradictory and always very French essay, Jean Daniel argues that contemporary Jews have…
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