Mark Cohen
By Mark Cohen
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Culture Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh, Hello Grandkids of My Original Fans
From this you make a living? No undertaking deserved that Jewish punch line more than turning the French folksong “Frère Jacques” into a parody called “Sarah Jackman.” But Allan Sherman showed how that could be done. Sarah Jackman, Sarah Jackman How’s by you, how’s by you? How’s by you the family? How’s your sister Emily?…
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The Schmooze Where Are All the Jewish Beatniks?
I had skin in the game when Bill Morgan’s “The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete Uncensored History of the Beat Generation” (Simon & Schuster) was published a month ago. With a title like that, it would surely undermine the premise of my own just released Beat book, “Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of…
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Culture Reader, He Married Her
AN AMERICAN TYPE By Henry Roth W.W. Norton & Co., 283 pages, $25.95 Henry Roth’s new posthumous novel, “An American Type,” owes the attention it is getting, and indeed its very existence, to the author’s 1934 classic modernist Jewish novel, “Call It Sleep.” Nothing less than that masterpiece could have inspired the devotion required to…
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Culture A Jewish Frankenstein
In the film “American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein,” the eponymous subject — denunciator of Israel, conspiracy monger and self-described “Frankenstein” — complains that the “Holocaust has long since ceased to be a source of moral and historical enlightenment.” Well, this surprisingly entertaining new documentary fixes that alleged problem. The Holocaust is the source…
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Books Chabon and Alter: Is it Esprit d’escalier or Trepverter?
Robert Alter discussed “tough Jews” with Michael Chabon on March 18 as part of the Berkeley Seminars in Modern Jewish Culture Lecture, but there seemed to be a gap in the Jewishness. Alter, the Berkeley professor and great critic of Jewish writing, interviewed the Pulitzer Prize-winning Chabon and asked about the author’s exuberant style, the…
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Culture Drawing on Hitler’s Book
On the way to the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco where Our Struggle: Responding to Mein Kampf opened on February 11 for a five-month run, a cranky neighborhood in my mind muttered, “History is bunk.” Then I remembered that the phrase was coined by Henry Ford, the carmaker and antisemite, and I was tossed…
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Opinion I spoke out against Mamdani. Then he won. Here’s how we walk forward together.
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News Indiana University removed its Jewish studies director. His replacement has ignited a firestorm over Israel.
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Opinion Why a concert hall should be the last place for a protest — particularly an antisemitic one like this
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Fast Forward Groundbreaking analysis of Hitler’s DNA shows no Jewish ancestry — but finds a genetic disorder
In Case You Missed It
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Yiddish אַן אינטערוויו אויף ייִדיש מיט דער פֿילמאָגראַפֿקע פּערל גליקA chat in Yiddish with filmmaker Pearl Gluck
פּערל גליק, וואָס איז דערצויגן געוואָרן אין די חסידישע קרײַזן, וועט דערציילן ווי ייִדיש שפּילט אַ ראָלע אין אירע פֿילמען.
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Opinion Settlers torched a West Bank mosque — and the milquetoast Israeli mainstream response won’t suffice
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Culture This Jesus horror movie could have used more heresy
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Film & TV Her parents fled Mexico and Mandatory Palestine, taking their traumas with them
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