Laura Albert
By Laura Albert
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Culture EXCLUSIVE: The Soloway Siblings: Are Their Boundaries Your Triggers?
_Author’s Note: This article first appeared on January 21, 2019. Although they were already identifying as non-binary by then, their name change to Joey Soloway was still a little over a year away. To bring our interview up to date, I’ve made a few needed revisions to the original text. Growing up in the ‘70s…
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Culture EXCLUSIVE: The Soloway Sisters: Are Their Boundaries Your Triggers?
Growing up in the 1970s in a lower-middle-class liberal Jewish family in Brooklyn, I lived in an integrated Mitchell Lama building and went to an integrated local school. I also went to protests, singing “We Shall Overcome” with Pete Seeger at the South Street Seaport; to me, that was part of being Jewish. It was…
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49 Reasons Why 2016 Wasn't as Bad as You Think Disney’s Jewish Princess Moana
By Laura Albert Growing up Jewish in Brooklyn, I often heard that Jews were the Chosen People. So, imagine my surprise when I realized that Moana, the Polynesian princess in Disney’s new animated feature, repeatedly proclaims herself to be “chosen.” She is chosen to save her people — and she has no doubt that she…
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Culture Is Moana Disney’s First Jewish Princess?
Growing up Jewish in Brooklyn, I often heard that Jews were the Chosen People. So, imagine my surprise when I realized that Moana, the Polynesian princess in Disney’s new animated feature, repeatedly proclaims herself to be “chosen.” She is chosen to save her people — and she has no doubt that she has been chosen….
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Culture How To Kill a Butterfly Like Elena Ferrante — or JT Leroy
What shocks me is not that someone was able to rip away the veil of privacy from the Italian writer known to the world as Elena Ferrante; nor am I surprised that she was able to maintain that anonymity for as long as she did. What startles me is the spectacle of people reporting this…
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Culture What I Learned From Lou Reed
There was a time when I fell into the habit of writing in my mind to Lou Reed. The thought of him and his music quickened me to narrate to him and ask him questions. He had liked my writing and we had been put in touch, and I admitted all this to him, saying…
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Culture Recalling the Jews, Radicals and Rogues Who Created Greenwich Village
When I was a kid in the 1970s growing up in Brooklyn, making the trek to Greenwich Village was as close as you could get to a trip down the rabbit hole. I knew vaguely about its history, but it wasn’t something folks talked about proudly, not the way they spoke about other parts of…
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Culture ‘Elephant’ Woman Meets ‘Elephant’ Man
Kenneth Sherman’s collection of poems “Words For Elephant Man” was first published in 1983 and has just been rereleased by Porcupine’s Quill. It reads with the richness typical of a painting or a novel — so moving at times that I found myself weeping. It is hard to keep in mind that one is not…
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