Jerome A. Chanes
By Jerome A. Chanes
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Culture Art That Is at Once Lush and Spare
As a graphic artist, Mark Podwal has long been taken with ritual and mysticism, mythology and superstition, angels and magic — particularly as these implicate and influence Jewish tradition via midrash and Kabbalah. Jewish folk beliefs are central to his work. But to Podwal, folk traditions are a vehicle in a larger enterprise: nothing less…
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Culture Remembering the Y.U. of Yore
My Yeshiva College: 75 Years of Memories Edited by Menachem Butler and Zev Nagel Yashar Books, 387 pages, $21.95. With all the hoopla surrounding last year’s commemoration of the 75th anniversary of Yeshiva College, the most interesting retrospective came about through the efforts of two recent graduates of Yeshiva University, the central institution of Modern…
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Culture A Shoah Story, From Israel
Our Holocaust By Amir Gutfreund, Translated by Jessica Cohen The Toby Press, 407 pages, $24.95. ‘Tain’t what a man sez, but wot he means that the traducer has got to bring over.” Thus Ezra Pound to W.H.D. Rouse, on literature. What a difference a definite article makes. In its Hebrew original, the title of Amir…
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Culture Language Lover Gets Back to His Roots
HebrewTalk: 101 Hebrew Roots and the Stories They Tell By Joseph Lowin EKS Publishing Company, 220 pages, $27.95. * * *| Joseph Lowin comes from a long line of lovers of the Hebrew language — from medieval grammarians Menahem ben Saruk, Dunash Ben Librat, ben Hayujj and ibn Janakh, who invented Hebrew grammar, and the…
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Culture Sounding Alarms Without Sounding Alarmist
The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It By Phyllis Chesler Jossey-Bass, 320 pages, $24.95. Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism By Abraham H. Foxman HarperSanFrancisco, 320 pages, $24.95. —— Those Who Forget the Past: The Question of Anti-Semitism Edited by Ron Rosenbaum Random House Trade Paperbacks, 649…
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News That’s Entertainment!
Growing up in “Jewish New York” in the 1950s and 1960s, I didn’t think too much about the fact that Betty Boop was a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn, out for a little fun. The wonderful conceit of the Jewish Museum’s “Entertaining America” is that the viewer obligingly slips into the pew of the secular…
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Opinion Outrage over Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed on sexual assault of Palestinians is missing the point
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News They texted about Torah and mitzvahs. Feds say they were insider trading
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Culture At Eurovision, Israel’s near triumph shows the limits of tolerance
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Opinion I run The Jewish Theological Seminary. Here’s the real story about President Isaac Herzog speaking at our commencement
In Case You Missed It
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Fast Forward Israeli far-right minister orders Arab village evicted after saying ICC is seeking his arrest
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Culture In celebration of David Attenborough’s 100th birthday, a very Jewish song
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Fast Forward Barney Frank’s final warning on Israel: ‘America’s effort should be to support the opposition to Netanyahu’
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Yiddish ייִדן פֿלעגן באַשווערן רוחות און שלאַנגען אויף ווײַסרוסישJews used to conjure spirits and snakes in Belarusian
בײַ ייִדן איז פֿאַראַן אַן אַלטע טראַדיציע צו שרײַבן רײַסישע סגולות מיט ייִדישע אותיות.