Joshua Cohen
By Joshua Cohen
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News Congregants Protesting After Czechs Oust Rabbi
PRAGUE — On June 29, the Jewish Community of the Czech Republic abruptly dismissed its chief rabbi, Karol Sidon, a playwright and a well-known communist-era dissident, after 12 years of service. Two days later, the Jewish Community named Manis Barash — the longtime Chabad Lubavitch rabbi in Prague, who is a native of New York…
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News Following an Unlikely Tip, Auschwitz Dig Unearths a Trove of Lost Judaica
OSWIECIM, Poland — A crew of Polish archeologists searching for a buried treasure at the former site of the Great Synagogue here struck gold Monday when they discovered a trove of artifacts, including three synagogue menorahs, a Chanukah menorah, the eternal light and several synagogue chandeliers. The diggers were acting on evidence — unearthed in…
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News Finding Poetry in the Landscape Of Paul Celan’s Bukovina
I began my pilgrimage in Prague, the city in which I now live, evoked by Paul Celan in his poem “In Prague”: bone-Hebrew ground into sperm ran through the hourglass through which we swam, two dreams now, chiming against time, in the squares. In this poem I find an extended metaphor for Jewish survival —…
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News Sighet and the Mittel Ages
Though the German thinker Wilhelm Marr came up with “anti-Semitism,” and we have Raphael Lemkin to thank for “genocide,” Elie Wiesel’s “Holocaust” is the most original term in this horrid neo-lexicon. Holocaust (noun): complete consumption by fire. Our next stop in this travel-writing series was Sighetu Marmatiei, Romania — Wiesel’s hometown — where we ventured…
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News Everything Is Not Illuminated
PRAGUE — Literature is the accounts of the outside writing in. This is a “golden rule,” for the post-World War I “lost generation” and, it’s possible to argue, for the whole of Jewish literature. Central and Eastern Europe has played host to some of literature’s greatest outsiders, including Franz Kafka, who, writing in German, became…
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