Josh Lambert
By Josh Lambert
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Culture Jewish Power Tools
I recall very clearly the afternoon in the early 1990s when the male eighth graders at the Jewish day school I attended learned about AIDS. Our physical education teacher, one of many Israelis imported to Toronto to staff the school, gathered us under the basketball nets in the gym and described the deadly disease. Then…
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Culture 132 Years of American Jewish Fiction
It’s not news that Jews tell the same stories over and over again. Anyone who has attended a Simchat Torah celebration knows that when the congregation finally reaches the last sentence of the Torah, they take a deep breath, twirl around a few times, drink a little schnapps, and then, with no further ado, start…
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Books Ruth Wisse: Generous Mentor, Worthy Adversary
Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon: Essays on Literature and Culture in Honor of Ruth R. Wisse Edited by Justin Daniel Cammy, Dara Horn, Alyssa Quint and Rachel Rubinstein *Harvard University Press, 750 pages, $75. * In September 1976, Commentary printed the letters of three novelists who had taken umbrage at appraisals of their work, in…
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Culture Michigan Welcomes a New Department
In the wide world of academia, $20 million isn’t all that much money. A check for that amount wouldn’t quite cover the down payment on a particle accelerator, after all, and universities tend to set their fund-raising targets in the billion-dollar range. Yet in the smaller academic niche of Jewish studies, $20 million is a…
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Culture A Late Pioneer Is Still Pushing Boundaries
What’s so comic, exactly, about comic books? As far back as the Golden Age, when the form flourished in the hands of mostly Jewish American young men, relatively few of the word-and-picture narratives to which we ascribe this label have been primarily concerned with humor. The dominant modes have been action, mystery, horror and romance….
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Culture FALL BOOKS
The Final Solution: A Story of Detection By Michael Chabon. Fourth Estate/HarperCollins, 144 pages, $16.95. —– Depending on their authors’ predilections, so-called “literary” novels are often unsettling, disturbing, enlightening or tragicomic. They are not, in the main, much fun. Fun is left to hacks, those genre writers who churn out the chick-lit blockbusters, weepy romances,…
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Culture A Boatload of Languor And Dreaminess
House on the River: A Summer Journey By Nessa Rapoport Harmony Books, 146 pages, $22. ——– In literature’s most ambitious exploration of the collision between Canada and the Jews, “Solomon Gursky Was Here,” novelist Mordecai Richler conjured Ephraim Gursky, a highly Bronfmanesque patriarch and explorer who so influences Inuit tribes that they don taleisim long…
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Culture Up and Down, Over and Out
Both Beautiful and Bewildering, Naama Goldstein’s Style Is Undeniably Original The Place Will Comfort You By Naama Goldstein * * *| In her debut collection of short stories, “The Place Will Comfort You,” Naama Goldstein explores the emotional effects of displacement from American to Israeli culture and back again. As an epigraph and symbol for…
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