David Kaufmann
By David Kaufmann
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Culture Food Fight
The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate Edited by Ruth Fredman Cernea University of Chicago Press, 184 pages, $18 — As if we didn’t have enough on our plates, here’s something new to argue about. Not that Jews don’t have a fine history of conflict: Hillel vs. Shammai, Bundists vs. Zionists, Labor vs. Likud. But now, to have…
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Culture Whither Utopia?
Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought For an Anti-Utopian Age By Russell Jacoby Columbia University Press, 240 pages, $24.95. * * *| Utopianism has gotten a bad rap over the past 50 years. The desire to secure happiness through the basic transformation of social institutions has been blamed for most of the past century’s carnage, from Hitler’s…
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Culture Wild at Heart
Maurice Sendak, the focus of a retrospective running at The Jewish Museum in New York until August 14, is the poet laureate of ambivalence. In a career of more than 50 years spent writing and illustrating children’s books, he has largely managed to avoid the sentimentalizing idealization that ruins so much of our thinking about…
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Culture Untranslatable Sentiments
Paul Celan: Selections Edited by Pierre Joris University of California Press, 230 pages, $17.95. * * *| It might seem ironic that the most important German poet of the second half of the 20th century was a Romanian Jew who lived most of his adult life in Paris. But it is not. Paul Celan, born…
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Culture The Recklessly Relevant Poet
Unlike many poets in her generation, Muriel Rukeyser was always adamantly, sometimes even recklessly, relevant. Born into a well-to-do Jewish family on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in 1913, she was both a firmly committed leftist and a bohemian. She drew on the sometimes-conflicting energies of Popular-Front activism and poetic experimentalism, which animated her work from…
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Culture The Praying Atheist A Look at the Poetry of Karl Shapiro
This is the second in a series of three poetry reviews, published in celebration of National Poetry Month. By the late 1940s, Karl Shapiro had already cut an impressive figure in American poetry. He was only 32 when he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945. The following year he became the Library of Congress’s consultant…
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Culture Every Jew a Canny Yankee
The American Poets Project seeks to present America’s most significant poets in inexpensive editions. In celebration of National Poetry Month, over the next three weeks David Kaufmann will look at the work of three Jewish poets included in the project, beginning with Emma Lazarus and followed by Karl Shapiro and Muriel Rukeyser. It has been…
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Culture The Real Lives Behind the Superheroes
In the late 1930s, comic books presented a relatively small sideshow in the circus of pulp publishing. Then suddenly, in the fall and winter of 1938, following into early 1939, they became the main event. Within a year — by 1940 — 15 million comic books were being sold each month (and this in a…
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