Michael Goldfarb
By Michael Goldfarb
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Culture How Jackie Mason remade the world of Jewish stand-up comedy
In the middle of the last century, American stand-up comedy became a subsidiary of the Jewish cultural-industrial complex. But the secret of its extraordinary success was that while its practitioners were obviously Jewish, their material was never too overtly Jewish. Except for Jackie Mason. The great names of the stand-up scene — Joan Rivers, Woody…
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Opinion The Secret Friendship Behind Israel’s Support Of Kurdish Independence
“We have no friends but the mountains,” is an old Kurdish saying. No friends but the mountains — and Israel — is the reality. There is a deep affinity between Israel and the Kurds. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was alone among world leaders when he endorsed Kurds preparing to vote in an independence referendum….
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Culture The Gospel According to British-Jewish Author Naomi Alderman
● The Liars’ Gospel By Naomi Alderman Little, Brown and Company, 320 pages, $25.99 It is odd that in a media-saturated time when people seem unable to remember important events that happened last week, much less the decades-long story of how we got into the economic and political mess we’re in, historical storytelling flourishes. Whether…
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News A Pioneering Polymath Who Is Open About His Faith
Robert Winston is a man of many titles: Baron Winston of Hammersmith, ennobled because of his status as the world’s leading researcher in in vitro fertilization treatments; Professor Robert Winston, with a chair in science and society at London’s Imperial College; Chancellor Robert Winston of Sheffield Hallam University, and plain old Robert Winston, presenter of…
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News Debate Over Jewish Guidelines for Organ Donation Crosses the Atlantic
The controversy over what is dead according to Jewish law is no longer an intramural question among Orthodox rabbis on either side of the Atlantic. In Britain it is now being played out in public. As in the United States, the emotional question of organ donation is the battlefield. The most recent round of arguments…
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Culture Howard Jacobson Wins Literary Prize
Howard Jacobson’s “The Finkler Question” has won this year’s Man Booker Prize. In Britain, where they still read lots of books, they take their literary prizes seriously, and the Booker is the Oscar of prizes. It means more than the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award rolled into one. The prize money…
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Film & TV ‘Bojack Horseman’ creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg on his new, ‘unapologetically Jewish’ family affair
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Film & TV Who is Marty Reisman, the Jewish ping-pong star who inspired Timothée Chalamet’s new movie?
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Holy Ground This small, stubborn Appalachian synagogue is defying the odds — and so is its new rabbi
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News ADL chief attacks Zohran Mamdani, but gets his facts wrong
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Fast Forward Mass. man sentenced to 26 months in prison for threatening local synagogues, Israeli consulate
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Fast Forward New US Postal Service stamp honors Holocaust survivor and humanitarian Elie Wiesel
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Fast Forward Hamas reportedly accepts a deal it rejected as Israel mourns on yahrzeit of 6 murdered hostages
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