Eddy Portnoy
By Eddy Portnoy
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News A Curmudgeon?s Guide To Jewish History
Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me By Harvey Pekar and J.T. Waldman Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 176 pages, $24.95 A central question for fans of famed comics writer Harvey Pekar, who passed away in 2010, was whether he would produce a sequel to his 1978 classic, ?Standing Behind Old Jewish Ladies in Supermarket Lines.?…
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Culture Cartoonist Visits Most Contested City
Jerusalem: Chronicles From the Holy City By Guy Delisle Drawn & Quarterly, 320 pages, $24.95 A city so religiously and historically intense that it’s got its own eponymous syndrome for visitors who flip out under pressure, Jerusalem is the unequivocal go-to destination for anyone wanting a look at the world’s epicenter of multi-faith fanaticism. An…
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Culture Addicted to Love (and Drugs)
Kasher in the Rye: The True Tale of a White Boy from Oakland Who Became a Drug Addict, Criminal, Mental Patient, and Then Turned 16 By Moshe Kasher Grand Central Publishing, 320 pages, $24.99 Flatscreen: A Novel By Adam Wilson Harper Perennial, 336 pages, $14.99 Since when did alcoholism and drug addiction become part of…
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Opinion Rate the Anti-Semites
Be your own anti-Semitic hall monitor! In the wake of the recent debate over a biting cartoon aimed at Benjamin Netanyahu, Occupy Judaism’s resident technologist, Dan Sieradski has created antisemiticornot. It’s a tongue-in-cheek site that allows users to post and vote on figures, organizations or concepts that may or may not be considered anti-Semitic. According…
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Culture Strange Tale of Hitler’s Jewish Psychic
The Nazi Séance: The Strange Story of the Jewish Psychic in Hitler’s Circle By Arthur Magida Palgrave Macmillan, 288 pages, $26 Where else but in the annals of Jewish history does a boy born to a pair of impoverished runaways become a world-famous mind reader, psychic, astrologer, crime fighter, newspaper publisher, novelist and, if that’s…
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News Transgender Jews May Be Nothing New
There is always that question of what the shtetl Jews who populate the stories of writers like Sholom Aleichem might think about a transgender folk-punk band named Schmekel, which will be appearing October 29 at the Nehirim Queer Shabbaton, at the JCC in Manhattan. Bands like Schmekel, which uses Yiddish as an alternative culture to…
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Culture New ‘Maus’ Is Virtual Memoir of Father
Metamaus, A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus By Art Spiegelman Pantheon, 300 pages, $35 Sitting forlornly on my bookshelf is a dusty, book-shaped box containing an antiquated item known as a CD- ROM. Titled, “Maus,” it was produced in 1992 and epitomized the cutting edge of hypertext at that time. Containing digitized versions of…
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The Schmooze We Pay _____(adjective) Homage to Leonard Stern
Getty Images Leonard Stern, creator of the ___|___|___|_ (adjective) popular fill-in-the-blank word game, “Mad Libs,” ___|___|___| (verb) this week at the age of 88. An Emmy award winning comedy ___|___|_ (noun) whose work appeared in “The Honeymooners” and “The ___|___|__ (name) Silvers Show,” Stern happened upon the unusual ___|___|___|_ (noun) after asking fellow “Honeymooners” writer,…
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