Ilan Stavans
By Ilan Stavans
-
Culture As Modernity Beckoned
Ladino Rabbinic Literature & Ottoman Sephardic Culture By Matthias B. Lehmann Indiana University Press, 280 pages, $39.95. Until the end of the 15th century, the Iberian Peninsula was not only a Muslim enclave but also a site of dialogue between three religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The expulsion of Jews and Arabs irrigated their communities…
-
Culture The Moses Between Egypt and Mendelssohn
Maimonides Sherwin B. Nuland. Schocken, 256 pages, $19.95. * * *| Three Moseses have decisively shaped Jewish history. On one end is Moses the Egyptian, a lawgiver and political leader whose vision established the path for a monotheistic revolution, thus defining the spiritual boundaries of a people. On the opposite end is Moses Mendelssohn, whose…
-
Culture A Babel Biographer Chases His Moving Target
Savage Shorthand: The Life and Death of Isaac Babel By Jerome Charyn Random House, 224 pages, $24.95. * * *| Isaac Babel was an iconoclast whose small, mysterious oeuvre, delivered in a deft, compact Russian shaped at a time of revolution, becomes more alluring with the passage of time. As Jerome Charyn puts it in…
-
Culture A Babel Biographer Chases His Moving Target
Savage Shorthand: The Life and Death of Isaac Babel By Jerome Charyn Random House, 224 pages, $24.95. * * *| Isaac Babel was an iconoclast whose small, mysterious oeuvre, delivered in a deft, compact Russian shaped at a time of revolution, becomes more alluring with the passage of time. As Jerome Charyn puts it in…
-
Culture Saying Adios to a Jewish Book Series
In 1996, I received an invitation from Dana Asbury at the University of New Mexico Press to develop a series devoted to Jewish Latin America. I was entranced by the idea. Having come of age in the Mexico of the late 1960s and ’70s, I had made up my mind, in my early 20s, to…
-
Culture What Melting Pot?
Name a Woody Allen movie that has a leading black actor in its cast. Now, mention a “Seinfeld” episode in which Elaine, Jerry, George and Kramer socialize in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with some Korean friends. How about a story with Cuban Americans, written by Isaac Bashevis Singer? Movies, television and literature…
-
Culture The Middle East, Spanish Style
‘Only Human” (“Seres Queridos”) is the first Spanish film to address the Middle Eastern conflict directly. Set in Madrid and designed as a comedy of errors, it is about the Dalinsky family, a neurotic Jewish clan made up of Gloria, a yiddishe mame; her absentee husband, Ernesto, and three adult children: brainy Leni; Tania, a…
-
Culture The Man Behind a Legendary Effort
Opportunities That Pass: An Historical Miscellany By Cecil Roth, edited by Israel Finestein and Joseph F. Roth, foreword by Raphael Loewe Vallentine Mitchell, 256 pages, $28.95. * * *| Of all the scholarly efforts in Jewish studies, none may be more influential than the 16-volume “Encyclopedia Judaica.” Since its publication in Jerusalem, in 1972, it…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Fast Forward Why neo-Nazis marched in Ohio this weekend, and almost every weekend in the US
- 2
Opinion The group behind Project 2025 has a plan to protect Jews. It will do the opposite.
- 3
Opinion Just about every interpretation of Trump’s narrow election victory is wrong
- 4
News Your complete guide to Trump’s Jewish advisers and pro-Israel cabinet
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion After all that controversy, here’s why Ta-Nehisi Coates (probably) didn’t change any minds on Israel-Palestine
-
Looking Forward How a Jewish student at Columbia became an icon of a movement
-
Culture At 95, Shaindel Schreiber is still dispensing babka and advice on the Lower East Side
-
Fast Forward Fighting antisemitism is ‘an American issue’ not a Democratic or Republican one, says House Democratic leader
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
