Gordon Haber writes about religion and culture in addition to editing the CANVAS Compendium, a newsletter on Jewish arts and culture. He does not live in Brooklyn.
Gordon Haber
By Gordon Haber
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News He’s a Soul Man
On a recent Sunday morning at Canter’s, the legendary Los Angeles deli, business was brisk. As usual, the customers were an eclectic mix: hipsters, rockers, senior citizens. And, at a table near the front sat Simon Rutberg, a slim, graying man in glasses and a black T-shirt. Rutberg himself is something of a legend. The…
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The Schmooze Why Branding Judaism Is a Bad Idea
I blame Heeb. Launched in 2001, “The New Jew Review” iterated a sharp, satirical take on Jewish culture. The idea was to edify through mockery: Thus a 2005 cover featured Sarah Silverman displaying her cleavage through a hole in a sheet. Although it can try too hard to shock (remember Roseanne Barr as Hitler baking…
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Culture The Resegregation of the United States of America
MY LOS ANGELES IN BLACK AND (ALMOST) WHITE By Andrew Furman Syracuse University Press, 248 pages, $24.95 In California, they call us freeway flyers — adjunct college instructors who commute between far-flung schools. Thus, half the week I teach at El Camino College in Compton, one of the more disadvantaged neighborhoods in Los Angeles. The…
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Culture The Man Who Saved New York
DEALINGS By Felix Rohatyn Simon & Schuster, $27.00, 304 pages His life is, in some ways, a classic tale of a Jewish boy making good. In 1940, at the age of 12, Felix Rohatyn escaped Nazi-occupied France with gold coins hidden in toothpaste tubes. After migrating to the U.S., Rohatyn earned a physics degree and…
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Culture Misery Would Love Some Company
Eden By Yael Hedaya, Translated by Jessica Cohen Metropolitan Books, 496 Pages, $35 In Yael Hedaya’s fiction, everyone — man, woman and child — leads a life of quiet desperation, wherein the usual forms of solace are futile. Love is disappointing. Success brings confusion. Family life is stress inducing. (Invariably in Hedaya’s books, children are…
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Culture Steering Between God And Reason In America
Is America a “Christian” nation? Or is it a secular nation, subject to Jefferson’s “wall of separation” between church and state? For many Americans, these are the central questions about the role of religion in public life. But the assumptions behind both questions reveal a certain ignorance. The story of America is not some fantasy…
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Culture Marching Toward Obscenity
Some years ago, on an overcast spring morning, I visited Majdanek, the Nazi concentration camp near Lublin, Poland. I recall many disturbing sights from that day — the gas chamber, the barracks, the monumental concrete bowl containing tons of human ash. But one unnerving sight was more about the living: the teenagers who had wrapped…
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Food Yid.Dish: Brisket Goes South of the Border
To reinterpret Tennyson: In the autumn a not-so-young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of brisket. Even in Los Angeles, the alleged city of no seasons, the days get shorter and the evenings get chilly. At such times my thoughts turn to big, comforting hunks of meat. This year I wanted a new twist on…
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