Joshua Cohen
By Joshua Cohen
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Culture New Time Religion
Wrestling With Angels: New and Collected Stories By John J. Clayton The Toby Press, 616 pages, $27.95. Kuperman’s Fire By John J. Clayton The Permanent Press, 304 pages, $28. Jews are at the vanguard of everything happening in America today. Surprisingly, this is still true when it comes to religion. Thanks to technology, or terrorism,…
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Culture Uncle Joe the Exquisite
Joseph Epstein is perhaps the smartest American alive who also writes well. That he has done so quietly, with impeccable modesty, is a mark of what might be called wisdom. His subjects have been oppositely rambunctious: literature, marriage and divorce, snobbery (“Snobbery,” 2002), envy (“Envy,” 2003) and friendship (“Friendship,” 2006), among others. Ambition? He wrote…
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News Historic Community Celebrates Its Past
You know you’re in for it when you’re still in New Jersey but you’re not on the map. The highway gave way to smaller streets with curious names: Gershal Avenue turned onto Eppinger, then Rosenfeldt, Shiff Avenue, then Isaacs, and, as Norma, N.J., gave way to Alliance, gave way to Brotmanville, there was narrow Brotman…
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Culture Topical Solutions
Lost Between the Edges By Eldon Garnet Semiotext(e)/MIT Press, 240 pages, $14.95. Outcast By Shimon Ballas Translated from the Hebrew by Ammiel Alcalay and Oz Shelach City Lights Publishers, 210 pages, $13.95. The moment a newspaper headline is made, writers of ambition break ranks with journalism and come to attention with books, ostensibly products of…
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Culture Revising Revisionist History
The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy By Adam Tooze Viking, 832 pages, $32.95. A Shadow of Red: Communism and the Blacklist in Radio and Television By David Everitt Ivan R. Dee, 432 pages, $27.50. A cursory search of the Internet, which is the latest and perhaps most perplexing form…
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Culture Aleph-Bet: An Alphabet for the Perplexed
In “Aleph-Bet: An Alphabet for the Perplexed” (Six Gallery Press), writer Joshua Cohen, a literary critic for the Forward, and artist Michael Hafftka reinterpret the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, in form and in function, in manners both mundane and mystical: The letter hey becomes a hat; the letter yod is said to represent…
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Culture Writing About Other Writers
Last week, Joshua Cohen began his review of Leonard Michaels’s “Collected Stories” by praising Michaels’s first collection, “Going Places.” This week, he concludes with a look at Michaels’s second collection, and “The Nachman Stories.” If you missed the first part, click here. Leonard Michaels: The Collected Stories Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 416 pages, $26. Leonard…
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Culture City Boy
Leonard Michaels: Collected Stories Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 403 pages, $26. Melrose was the last kosher delicatessen in my Brooklyn neighborhood, Brighton Beach. It closed this past spring. Its window was shuttered, and a sign was hung, informing all that the business had moved to the Long Island suburb of Cedarhurst. After 1989, Brighton Beach,…
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