Ken Gordon
By Ken Gordon
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Opinion This Oped Will Not Tell You How Great We Are
Let’s begin with a truth: Much of what gets published by and in the Jewish communal world is pure self-promotion. Look around, and you’ll see articles, comments, essays, posts and tweets whose chief purpose is to extol the virtues of this or that Jewish communal organization or program. Most authors of this material don’t even…
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Opinion Turning to Day Schools When Synagogues Just Won’t Do
My name is Ken Gordon, and I don’t belong to a synagogue. When the Pew Research Center reported that two-thirds of American Jews are in the same situation, I didn’t break out into a cold Jewish sweat, as did so many of my colleagues. I thought instead: I’m not alone! My wife and I send…
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The Schmooze Moody Thoughts About Bob Dylan and Cher
What do Bob Dylan, Cher, and Rick Moody have in common? Stop thinking, “Well, Dylan and Cher both did projects with the word “burlesque” in them…” Here’s the answer: Once upon a time William G. Scheele, who was the equipment/stage manager for The Band and Bob Dylan from 1969 to 1976 and a photographer whose…
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Culture Mr. Cahan’s Neighborhood
Republished together by Dover in 1970, Cahan’s 1896 novella “Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto” and his 1898 collection, “The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto,” are not “Dubliners.” Cahan overwrites. In fact, he is guilty of crossing the street — crossing the street and jumping on a trolley…
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Culture The Prophetic Delmore Schwartz
Even if it is in David Mamet’s sense of a “lapsed Talmudist,” my method of reading is Talmudic. When I read, I ask myself, and the text in hand, endless questions, questions that often engage with the various texts I’ve read over the years. This hypertextual mess sometimes clogs up the margins of my books…
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Culture Conflict and Compromise: Day School Parents Weigh In
Last year, I published an essay on MyJewishLearning.com called “Seize the Day School.” I worried about this essay. “Seize” spelled out, in great detail, my own ambivalences — note the plural — about sending my daughter to Solomon Schechter Day School of Greater Boston. I feared that once the piece was published, her teachers might…
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News The Marginally Jewish Reader: Nathanael West
Once upon a time, David Mamet picked up Abraham Cahan?s ?The Imported Bridegroom,? and in the course of perusing the book, he later wrote, ?I discovered in myself the racial type of the lapsed Talmudist.? The first time I read of Mamet?s discovery, in the preface to the playwright?s ?Writing in Restaurants,? I cheered. I…
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Culture Office Space — A Communal Setting
Back in September, JBooks.com, the Web site I edit, teamed up with JVibe*, the magazine for Jewish teens, to throw an intergenerational event called Get Lit 2008. Preparing for this literary *soirée (which featured writers Tova Mirvis, Jonathan Wilson, Adam Wilson and Jon Papernick) was a lot of work, but publicizing it was remarkably easy….
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