J. Hoberman
By J. Hoberman
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Culture Could It Be Time For A Yiddish ‘Porgy And Bess?’
Suppose, instead of adapting the white Southerner DuBose Heyward’s 1925 novel “Porgy,” the Russian-Jewish American composer George Gershwin took on the Russian-Jewish Russian writer Isaac Babel’s 1926 play “Sunset.” Imagine a Gershwin folk opera set in a Jewish ghetto, rather than African-American slum, not populated by the poor people and criminals of Catfish Row but…
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Art In 1930s German And Austrian Art, Portents Of A Dark Future
Currently at the Neue Galerie, the exhibition “Before the Fall: German and Austrian Art of 1930s,” is as fateful as its title suggests — devoted to paintings, photographs, prints and drawings made under the lengthening shadow of Nazi terror. It’s a show suffused with anxiety and denial. Many of the artists were representatives of the…
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News Lay-Offs Bring Curtain Down on Jewish Era at Village Voice
For much of its existence, the Village Voice was a paper where you could call a momzer a momzer and use just that term to do it. But the news in May that the out-of-town momzers who own the Voice had fired the paper’s last remaining signature writers — Michael Feingold, Michael Musto and Robert…
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Culture Fantasies of a Fascist America
The Plot Against America” is Philip Roth’s fantasy of a fascist America. Although it arguably has as much to do with contemporary America as its imaginary 1940-42 setting, Roth’s new book also belongs to a particular tradition of counterfactual history. In some respects, “The Plot Against America” recalls Sinclair Lewis’s cautionary “It Can’t Happen Here,”…
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News With God, and the Constitution, on His Side
A Hollywood movie about Jesus Christ, released in a presidential election year, is denounced by religious leaders, inspires antisemitic demonstrations and becomes an organizing tool for Christian fundamentalists: “The Last Temptation of Christ,” director Martin Scorsese’s 1988 adaptation of the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, anticipated Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” even as it…
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Fast Forward DC’s new Jewish museum highlights Jews who shaped the nation’s capital, from a Confederate spy to RBG
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Opinion Why I, as an Orthodox rabbi, am committed to LGBTQ+ inclusion
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FIRST PERSON What would you do if you got a Nazi relic in the mail?
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Yiddish הרבֿ גרשון איידלשטיין, גדול־הדור, איז נפֿטר געוואָרן צו 100 יאָרRabbi Gershon Edelstein, leader of Haredi Jewry, dies at 100
ר׳ גרשון האָט דאָס גאַנצע לעבן געפּריידיקט אַהבֿת־ישׂראל און אָפֿט גערופֿן פֿאַר אַחדות צווישן די פֿרומע און פֿרײַע ייִדן.
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