Joshua Cohen
By Joshua Cohen
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News Harold Pinter, Son of a Tailor and Weaver of the Absurd, Awarded a Nobel
On October 13, the Swedish Academy awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature to Harold Pinter — a writer who, in the words of the official citation, “uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.” Until that day, the only closed room to which many in the literary world wanted…
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Culture An Author’s Story, Fleshed Out in Flesh
My Body in Nine Parts By Raymond Federman Starcherone Books, 136 pages, $16. * * *| The marketing departments that run America’s publishing houses now dictate to most the definition of literature. Even in the Jewish community, one of the last remaining “focus groups” of avid readers, we have let significant writers slip through the…
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News A Fiction Writer With the Courage To Resist Imagination
If you’re a fiction writer, a dreamer like Joseph or just a liar, and you want to get a man out of a burning house you just say, or write, “The man got out of the burning house.” You can gift the man with wings, introduce a providential angel or a magical butterfly out of…
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Culture The Aphorism Master
Yes damns no. No postpones yes. Tragic facts don’t exist. The magic of fiction lies in deluding reason that it is fiction. All ways lead to the wayfarer. The long lineage of literature’s shortest form, the aphorism, extends from the mythical Hippocrates of Greek antiquity, through the Renaissance, Erasmus and Paracelsus, into the modern Europe…
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Culture Arabesques and E-Cantors In Prague, a Digital Re-envisioning of the Marseilles Bible
Around 1260, in the Spanish town of Toledo — then a prime seat of Jewish thought and art — an unknown scribe or possibly scribes gave life to a manuscript breathtaking in its rare beauty and hermetic symbolism, at once traditional and yet culturally reckless. Its pages — abundant in imagery while respecting the prohibitions…
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News Jewish Power Struggle Stirs Passion in Prague
PRAGUE — An ugly struggle for control of the Prague Jewish community ended officially late last month when the Czech Federation of Jewish Communities recognized a loose-knit opposition group as the legitimate steward of one of Europe’s oldest Jewish communities. In fact, however, the fight goes on despite the January 20 decision. The ousted community…
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Israel News The Way We Live Now: Without Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag, essayist, novelist, playwright, filmmaker and so many other things, will perhaps be most important to the future of American culture — if it indeed has a future — as an introducer. With her death on December 28 at age 71, there are few inquisitive enough to fill that all-important role. And there are…
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Culture Nazi Camp as Mecca for Artists?
An hour’s train ride from the Prague station from which thousands of Jews were deported in winter 1941, in a derelict small town pierced with unreal silence, Petr Larva has a dream. He imagines visual artists from all over the world converging on his adopted town, to live and work and exhibit. He imagines a…
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Fast Forward Why some Satmar Hasidic leaders endorsed Zohran Mamdani as mayor, stunning many Jewish voters
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Culture Mamdani’s first statement on antisemitism as mayor-elect got some weird pushback
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Culture Mamdani quoted Eugene Debs in his victory speech — there’s a long Jewish history there
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News Scott Wiener, Jewish Democrat and critic of Israel’s war in Gaza, vies for Nancy Pelosi’s seat
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Opinion Why a concert hall should be the last place for a protest — particularly an antisemitic one like this
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Looking Forward What Hailey Bieber smoothies and instant matzo ball soup reveal about American Jewish taste
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Culture Mamdani’s first statement on antisemitism as mayor-elect got some weird pushback
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