Gabriel Sanders
By Gabriel Sanders
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Culture Cold Mount Sinai
Landsman By Peter Charles Melman Counterpoint, 320 pages, $24.95. Few chapters of American history have inspired as many novelists as the Civil War. If, as the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has said, it is our “Iliad,” then we’ve been graced with not one, but hundreds of Homers. What America has been without is an Isaac…
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Life Olympic Logo Rorschach Test
An article in today’s New York Times reports that the newly-unveiled — and wildly unpopular — logo for the 2012 London Olympics has, among other things, been compared to a swastika. But not all have seen grounds for charging antisemitism. Daniel Finkelstein of the London Times sees embedded in the design the word “zion.”
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Film & TV ‘Munich’ Gets ‘Knocked Up’
When it was released in December 2005, Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” — the story of the Israeli agents tasked with assassinating those responsible for the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre — was criticized in some corners of the Jewish world for what was seen as lily-livered progressivism or, worse, downright hostility to Israel. The New Republic’s Leon…
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Culture Paretsky Unspools a New Mystery: Her Own
Writing In An Age Of Silence By Sara Paretsky Verso, 158 pages, $22.95. Decades before she developed the literary alter ego for which she is best known — the female private investigator V.I. Warshawski — mystery writer Sara Paretsky was already experimenting with fictional personas, fictional masks. As one of the few Jewish girls growing…
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Life Trading Feathers for a Yarmulke
Back in March, I wrote an article about how a Native-American memory site was staging an exhibition devoted to Anne Frank. The display, at the Bosque Redondo State Monument in New Mexico, offered a chance to talk about the Jewish-Indian relationship more broadly, from 17th-century interactions with converso settlers to the Native-American embrace of the…
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Culture A Mighty Pen and a Humble Heart
In 1997, Saul Friedländer, a historian at the University of California, Los Angeles, published the first half of his chef-d’oeuvre, “Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939.” Writing in The New York Times Book Review, historian Fritz Stern praised the book for being at once evocative and rigorous. “He writes history with…
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Israel News A Shmendrik’s Progress
Two weeks ago, The Shmooze reported on an unexpected occurrence of the word tsoris on HBO’s “The Sopranos.” Even “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams found it odd, saying that, unlike chutzpah, which everybody knows, tsoris belongs in a more rarefied class, alongside words like mishpokhe, shpilkes and keynehoreh. But if we are to go…
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Life Everyone’s a Critic (and a Therapist)
On Tuesday, as part of its spin on the Tikkun Leil Shavuot — the all-night study session traditionally observed on Shavuot eve — the JCC in Manhattan screened a number of episodes of the hit Israeli television series “Bitipul,” or “In Treatment.” (The JCC defines “study” broadly.) The series was presented by psychologists Jill Salberg…
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