Joshua Furst
By Joshua Furst
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The Schmooze Love Doomed in the Havana Harbor
In 1939, Cuba’s Batista government, in collaboration with the government of the United States, delayed a ship called the SS St. Louis, which carried 937 Jewish-German refugees, in the Havana harbor. Despite assurances that they would be granted asylum, the refugees were told that they could not enter Cuba without a visa. Twenty-two were eventually…
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Culture Public Accusation Against Woody Allen Has Ugly Whiff of a Lynch Mob
In the weeks since Mia Farrow took to Twitter to voice her disdain for the lifetime achievement award Woody Allen was given at this year’s Golden Globes, everyone and his sister has flooded the Internet with an opinion about Allen, Farrow’s daughter Dylan and what may or may not have transpired between them twenty-two years…
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Culture A Short History of Jews and Obscenity
● Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture By Josh Lambert NYU Press, 280 pages, $35 Among the Jewish traits I am most proud to be historically and culturally associated with is the way my people obstreperously defend our principles even when doing so goes against our best interests. I love the loudmouths and the…
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Books Chasing the Ghost of Norman Mailer
● Norman Mailer, A Double Life By J. Michael Lennon Simon & Schuster, 960 pages, $40 While reading the first chapter of “Norman Mailer, A Double Life,” the exhaustive (and exhausting) new biography of the great man by J. Michael Lennon, I discovered that during his formative years, from the age of nine through his…
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Culture In Defense of Amiri Baraka
A lot of people are going to be writing hagiographies of Amiri Baraka, who died on January 9, at the age of 79. A lot of other people are going to be painting him as a hateful, irredeemable anti-Semite. The truth is that Baraka wrote some of the greatest plays and poems of the post-war…
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Culture Why 2013 Was the Year Fiction Got Political Again
There was a time, not so long ago, in the 1960s and ’70s, when being a serious fiction writer required not just a talent for evoking nuanced moments of lived life, but a consciousness of the intellectual and political context in which our lives were being lived. Writers — many of them Jewish — as…
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Culture Al Goldstein Is Dead — and Our Culture Is a Little Poorer
So Al Goldstein is dead. It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about him, but I have to believe that our culture will be poorer without him. Al, if you recall, was the publisher and chief protagonist of the notorious porn magazine Screw. Obscenity isn’t just a description of Screw, it was also the…
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Culture The Most Graphic War Story Ever Told
● The Great War July 1, 1916: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme By Joe Sacco W.W. Norton & Company, one 24-foot-long accordion-style page and a 16 page supplementary booklet, $35 Anyone with an interest in the state of Israel, its contradictions and compromises, and the sad history of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian…
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