Eitan Kensky
By Eitan Kensky
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Culture Paul Auster Humanizes Dread in New Book
Winter Journal By Paul Auster Henry Holt and Co., 240 pages, $26 Paul Auster is one of America’s greatest storytellers. An errant phone call, a surprise inheritance, an urge to document every misstep you’ve ever made — Auster’s fiction often begins with unremarkable events and desires, only to end someplace unsettling and unrecognizable. Novels such…
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The Schmooze Jerry Seinfeld’s New Show About Nothing
Jerry Seinfeld, a famous comedian, used to be the star of “Seinfeld,” a sitcom about a comedian named Jerry Seinfeld and his friends. Larry David, a less-famous comedian, was a writer and co-creator of “Seinfeld,” and now stars as Larry David in “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” a show about the daily life of Larry David, co-creator…
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Culture Hip-Hop, Criticism and Crossword Puzzles
Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature By Daniel Levin Becker Harvard University Press, 352 pages, $27.95 It takes a certain kind of literary genius to explain rapper Fabolous’s lyrics using ancient Greek rhetorical devices. Best known for his 2001 song “Young’n (Holla Back)” — now an unintended time capsule for the long forgotten…
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The Schmooze Slideshow: Yiddish Communist Magazines
In conjunction with its conference on “Jews and the Left” (see our story here), the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has prepared an outstanding exhibition called “Shades of Red: Yiddish Left-Wing Press in America,” curated by Krysia Fisher and on view until September, 2012. Among the highlights of the exhibition is a series of arresting…
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Culture Jews, the Left and the Rest
On September 10, 1964, sociologist and former journalist Daniel Bell opened a conference at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research on “Jewish Participation in Social Progress Movements,” with a lecture on “Ideology and Social Movements.” Four years earlier, Bell argued in his landmark book, “The End of Ideology” (Free Press), that politics in the 1950s…
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Culture Adam Yauch and the Adolescent Sublime
Of all the Beastie Boys, I had the least attachment to Adam Yauch. It’s important to say this at the beginning because it’s impossible to talk about the Beastie Boys as individuals without talking about the group, and it’s impossible to talk about them as a band — to talk about their music — without…
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The Schmooze Why ‘Magic City’ Is Missing the Magic
Image courtesy of Starz/Greg Williams Here is a list of things that I like (and some that I love): Mad Men; “The Godfather Part II” villain Hyman Roth; “Bugsy,” “Once Upon a Time in America” and other visualizations of Jewish gangland; Miami Vice; Saul Bellow, Meyer Levin, and the early fiction of Bernard Malamud; Deborah…
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The Schmooze Jewish Humor on ‘Treasure Island’
Treasure Island!!! By Sara Levine Europa Editions, 172 pages, $15.00 There are as many Jewish humors as there are funny Jews, which is to say that there are 12 — and half of them haven’t been good in years. Many essentialist definitions of Jewish humor, such as the comedy of outsiders, or the comedy of…
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