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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Culture A Select History of the Elect
The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election By Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz Simon & Schuster, 272 pages, $26 If the Torah is to be believed, divine election is a series of mounting responsibilities and burdens. When God first talks to Abram, it is to announce to this obscure, aging tribesman…
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Food In Search of Mexican Pastrami
When I moved to Los Angeles last year, the first thing I noticed was that everybody here seems busy (but nobody ever gets anything done). The second thing I noticed was that Los Angeles is a pastrami town. I don’t just mean the famous delis like Langer’s and Canter’s. In Los Angeles, pastrami is often…
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Culture A Thoroughly Diverting Servant
The Fifth Servant By Kenneth Wishnia William Morrow, 387 pages, $24.99 While I like to pretend that I’m a highbrow, I’ve always been a sucker for genre fiction — in my case horror novels, thrillers and science fiction. Sometimes it’s just great to read a book that is unembarrassed about its desire to entertain. And…
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Culture At 79, a Grad Student Who Is Tackling Transit Problems
In most ways, Ralph Montview is a typical graduate student. On a recent weekday, he looked tired after a late night of proofing his master’s thesis, “Elements for Design of a Public Transit System.” His apartment in Anaheim, Calif., was messy, with books and papers piled on every available surface. He even jokingly insinuated that…
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Culture Hang On, Soupy
The other night, over dinner, I mentioned to a friend that I had to get home early to watch a documentary about Soupy Sales. My friend had no idea whom I was talking about, which made me feel a little sad. I guess I had believed that Sales was a timeless figure, a goofy, cultural…
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Culture The Surfing Jihadi
American Taliban By Pearl Abraham Random House, 272 pages, $25 Just in case the worldwide hatred of America wasn’t enough, here’s something else to worry about: “homegrowns,” or Americans who become so identified with radical Islam that they are willing to perform acts of violence. Sometimes it’s abroad, as with John Walker Lindh, whose conversion…
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Culture The Tarpan Strikes Back
American Jews can be strangely incurious about the actual daily life of their ancestors. This seems to hold especially true for those of Eastern European descent, who see the vast area between Germany and Russia as a giant killing field — thus reducing 1,000 years of culture to two words: “Never again.” I saw this…
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The Schmooze ‘Chasidim on the Fringe’: New Edgy Website
A frum friend recently suggested I take a look at Unpious.com, a website of “news, commentary, and writings by and for Hasidim on the fringe.” The word “fringe,” in this case, is not a reference to tzitzit, but to the type of Hasid who supposedly writes for Unpious—ambivalent and sex-obsessed. The essays on Unpious.com tend…
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